A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  “Tell me again what you heard Tess and Rory say about Hiram Frazier at that Thanksgiving play,” I heard myself saying to Orvid.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to get ahold of that. They were supposed to say, ‘Thank you, Mistress Farmer,’ and then sing ‘Come, Ye Thankful People, Come.’ But instead Rory said, ‘Thank you, Mister Frazier, for your gift.’”

  “‘Your gift,’” I repeated.

  “How about that.” Orvid’s face was supremely serene.

  It didn’t take me long to scour the library at the back of my skull and emerge with the facts I wanted.

  “Do you know about the alligator god in the ancient Egyptian pantheon?” I said, watching Hiram Frazier’s deeply wrinkled, leathery face. “He stands at the gate of death and weighs your heart. He uses one of those old scales, you know, like the scales of justice in that statue? The kind where the counterweight is on one side and the object you want to weigh is on the other? When the god-monster puts your heart on the scales, what does he use as its counterweight?”

  “Tell me,” Orvid indulged me.

  Good, I thought. The longer I keep this up, the longer I have to figure out how to keep Frazier alive.

  “An ostrich feather.” I smiled. “If your heart is lighter than the feather, you get to have your heart back, and you go on to a perfect afterlife. If your heart is heavy, the alligator eats it and you wander forever without a heart in the cold realms between this world and the next.”

  “Maybe you’re referring to the toxicology report for the girls,” Orvid realized. “You mean that when the girls died, they were laughing. They didn’t realize the peril of their situation. Their hearts were light.”

  “Yes.” I nodded once.

  “That is a gift.” Orvid smiled.

  “Just a thought,” I mumbled. “Only one of several.”

  “There are others?” Orvid said, slightly mocking.

  “Look at Mr. Frazier’s skin,” I ventured.

  Scales, warts, hard ridges, stood out on Frazier’s face and hands, and Orvid nodded. Alligator skin.

  “I think it’s probably best not to make too much of your mythological observations,” Orvid said after a second, “but on the other hand, they do give some import to our business here tonight, don’t they?”

  “I always think they do,” I answered haplessly.

  “Well, I get your point in this regard, anyway. Are you going to hand me back my knife now?”

  He made a show of hiding his gun away again.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I ventured, the words shaky, “but I’m not giving you this blade so you can kill a man.”

  “Damn,” he growled. “Give it to me.”

  He took another step my way and held out his right hand, motioning impatiently for his blade.

  “No, Orvid,” I told him firmly.

  Without warning Orvid sprang forward almost horizontal to the ground. His head plowed into my stomach like a cannonball. I flew backward, breath knocked out of me, and hit the ground hard, right next to a motionless Frazier.

  Orvid was standing over me instantly, soundless as a beam of moonlight. He kicked and I felt a searing pain in my hand. Orvid pulled the blade away from me quickly and held it a moment to one side of his body, low.

  Suddenly he lashed out; swung the blade like a golf club. Before I could move, the motion was complete.

  Frazier moaned and fell to one side.

  “What have you done?” I cried, trying to sit up.

  “Not what you think,” Orvid managed calmly.

  To my amazement, a second later Frazier put his hands out onto the wet grass and drew in a deep breath. It took me a moment to realize that Orvid had deftly cut the tie that had bound Frazier’s hands behind his back.

  Moving quickly, Orvid similarly dispatched the white bond around Frazier’s ankles.

  “Help me get him up, would you?” Orvid said to me.

  I found I could barely move, but I somehow got up and trundled in the direction of the body on the ground.

  We did our best to get Frazier to a standing position.

  “What now?” Frazier asked us blankly.

  “Where were you going when I stopped you?” Orvid asked Frazier quietly.

  “Home,” Frazier’s voice ground out. “Catch a train going home.”

  Orvid stood aside.

  “There are the tracks,” he told Frazier. “You’re going home.”

  I looked between the ancient preacher and the shorter albino. Neither seemed remotely real in the dim light of the clearing.

  Frazier nodded. “Time to go home, ain’t it?” He staggered toward the railroad tracks.

  “Wait,” I interrupted feebly.

  “Yes, it is,” Orvid answered Frazier, following the man.

  “We have to take Frazier back to Skid,” I began. “We can’t let him go. That’s not what I meant.”

  Perplexed beyond motion, I watched the two of them walk a step or two before I followed to intervene further.

  Frazier was humming to himself. I couldn’t tell the tune.

  “It’s coming.” Orvid stood directly behind him.

  I came to a stop a little to their right and looked down the tracks, trying to sight a train.

  “Hear it, Preacher?” Orvid went on.

  “I do.” Frazier nodded without looking back.

  I didn’t hear anything.

  “What are you doing, Orvid?” I whispered.

  I glanced at Frazier. His face was transformed, the moonlight washed it clean, and his eyes were closed in ecstatic rapture.

  “Are you ready?” Orvid asked.

  “I am,” Frazier whispered. “God Almighty, I am.”

  Tears fought their way past Frazier’s shut eyelids, made silver rills down his cheeks.

  I craned my neck, strained my eyes to see a train, but there was nothing.

  “There’s no train coming,” I said to Orvid. “Stop this. You’re just tormenting him now. What’s the point of that? We have to get him to my truck. We have to take him back to the sheriff.”

  “All right,” Orvid sighed.

  Orvid took one step backward, and faster than I could see, he raised his blade high in the air, snapping to an etched tableau for a split second.

  “No!” I exploded, lunging for Orvid.

  “Train’s coming,” Frazier whispered, softer than the wind, his face shining.

  A terrible, swift lightning cracked Orvid’s tableau, the sword vanished into Hiram Frazier’s back.

  The body fell to earth, at long last dead.

  There wasn’t a single drop of blood.

  Twenty-One

  I stood frozen, my face inches from Orvid’s blade. The crescent moon dangled in the sky, a curl of pale thread. It was a hint of the light that might exist beyond the black sky, a promise of morning.

  Sound resumed slowly in the clearing. Doves and tree frogs called, the wind picked up, a draft of cold water washing over everything.

  “You’re a monster.” My voice was leaden; my eyes steadfastly avoided the body by the tracks. “I have to …”

  But I couldn’t finish my sentence. I didn’t know what I had to do.

  Orvid’s blade had disappeared, and he was leaning on his ornate cane.

  “You were telling me at Judy’s house,” he said slowly, “about the character who slew the Minotaur. There was a girl waiting for him at the door that led out of the maze.”

  “Ariadne?” I mumbled, stunned.

  “She gave Theseus a bit of thread to take with him into the labyrinth. He held one end; she stood at the doorway, in the light, holding the other. When he wanted to come home, he followed the thread to her.”

  “Yes.” I tried to focus my eyes on Orvid.

  “There you go,” he said, his voice a mixture of November air and the scent of last harvest, a warm sound despite the cold that encased it.

  There was a rustle in the leaves behind us, and the half-expected voice came pourin
g into the air, cold and crisp.

  “It’s done, then.”

  I didn’t have to turn to see Judy. I could tell she was standing a few feet away.

  “Done and done,” Orvid agreed. “Been a long day.”

  For the first time his voice sounded tired, but only as if he’d just pulled a double shift at the textile mill.

  “It’s the end of the slope.” Judy came to Orvid. “All coasting downhill from now on.”

  I had the idea that she meant something quite significant, but I just couldn’t force my mind to stay with that idea long enough to explore it.

  “You planned this all along,” I accused Judy, still unable to look at her.

  “I told you this is what I wanted,” she said simply.

  I glared at Orvid.

  “You called her,” I stammered.

  “Didn’t have to.” A slight smile was or his lips. “She’s been following us.”

  “What?” I closed my eyes. “I led you both to this man so you could kill him?”

  “You have to know,” Orvid told me firmly, “that I would have found him on my own eventually.”

  I could hear the iron in his words and believed him. It was a merciful belief.

  “Let’s go, honey,” Judy said, taking Orvid’s hand. “I’ve got everything packed.”

  “I have to tell Skidmore what happened here,” I began, sounding a little like a child even to myself.

  “I know,” Orvid sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We really are going to disappear. He’ll never find us. And, you know, if you try to stop us now, I’ll just have to shoot you. I’m too tired to wrestle or anything, right?”

  Judy was standing there, beaming at her beau. She took exactly one second out of her adoration to give me a nod and a wave.

  “Good-bye, Dr. Devilin,” she said. “We won’t see one another again.”

  She returned her entire attention to the man standing beside her. The two of them started off.

  “Was that true, Orvid?” I ventured. “The thing you said about the girls in the Thanksgiving play, mentioning Hiram Frazier’s name? Or was that just something else to motivate me, like leaving the Bible verse open in my house?”

  Orvid sniffed once.

  “That’s true,” Judy said. “They called the man’s name. I heard it.”

  “I don’t understand.” I could barely see their faces in the moonlight.

  Clouds were flying by the moon.

  “Weatherman said tomorrow’s going to be clear,” Orvid announced softly, readying to close the door. “Should be a bright, sunny day.”

  “I could stand that,” Judy told him, smiling.

  I couldn’t do anything but watch them amble up the hill. Almost before I realized it, they were gone into the woods. A moment after that, car headlights pierced the night, making dancing shadows of a hundred trees. I watched until the light was gone. By then my muscles began to work again, and I headed away from the tracks.

  I was afraid to look back at the body on the ground behind me.

  Twenty-Two

  Somehow I made my way back to my truck, through the old mill.

  It seemed less haunted, more at peace. The brick walls were tired, but still managed to bathe themselves in moonlight and a reminiscence of former glory. Even the weeds had taken on a certain uplift, an aspiration to grander flora. Shadows hiding the corners of the building were purple, a royal cousin of the black that had crouched there before. One of the birds that called out might have been a skylark.

  The chrome of the door handle on my truck was cold, but I was grateful for something solid, a clear sensation. I climbed into the cab of the truck. I tried for a while to start the engine. It seemed to take forever.

  The drive home was perilous. My mind traveled, like Einstein’s mind riding his famous beam of light, across the sky in search of any kind of dawn.

  Instead, my thoughts were invaded by Promethean doubts and cold new astrophysics. I thought about dark matter. Anything to avoid thinking about the long night’s events.

  The primary dilemma, I mused, was that if Einstein’s theory of gravity was correct, galaxies ought to fly apart in more or less the same manner as my flashlight had when hit by Orvid’s knife. But clearly the galaxies were not coming unhinged, at least not ours. The road before me seemed uncommonly solid, in fact. But if Einstein’s theory of gravity was wrong, then nothing would be holding the universe together—nothing but dark matter. And if initial observations were correct, then the nondark matter, the kinc that would make up my hand, the steering wheel, the road, the earth, the sky, and everything I would be capable of experiencing in this reality, that kind of matter was in the minority. The vast minority. The kind of matter we are, we and the stars and everything we know, may well occupy as little as 5 percent of the universe, barely a speck of all reality.

  It was not the sort of thought I found comforting in the black hours before dawn, driving to Lucinda’s house.

  It didn’t help that the image of Hiram Frazier’s body dropping across the railroad tracks kept playing over and over in my head like a looped movie.

  By the time I pulled my truck in front of Lucinda’s, the mood had crystallized, and everything in my body and mind was hard and brittle.

  I turned off the headlights.

  I sat there in the truck, motor off, lights off, still in the dead night.

  In my mind I was digging in the black dirt of Lucinda’s garden with a blue-handled spade she had given me for a birthday long ago. I had just returned to Blue Mountain; she hadn’t yet recovered from the death of her husband.

  “What’s that?” She stood over me.

  “Fennel and dill,” I said without looking up.

  “What for?”

  “You like dill.”

  “What about the fennel?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “It was all they had left at Peterson’s. It was a going-out-of-business sale. These little packs were only a penny apiece.”

  “Peterson’s is going out of business?” She shifted her weight and the full slant of late-afternoon sun hit me in the corner of my left eye.

  “Yes. You don’t remember driving by there last week?”

  “I had a talk with Hammon today,” she told me softly.

  Hammon was her dead husband, crushed by a tractor. She often spoke to him in those days, or so she would tell me.

  I set down the spade and looked up as best I could in all that light. All I could see was a sepia shadow and a blast of gold. I waited for her to tell me what Hammon had said

  “It’s all set,” Lucinda said.

  “What’s all set?”

  She was staring down at the seed packets. They were faded and wrinkled, even though they had never been opened. Stamped on the bottom in gray that had once been black was the announcement Lot Packed for 1998 Season.

  “You know these won’t come up. They’re expired.”

  “Seeds don’t expire.” I looked down at the packets. “Do they?”

  “You’ll never get dill out of those little black dots.” Her voice was ghostly.

  “Maybe not. But I like being here with you, and digging up the dirt, and sitting out here in the sun.”

  “I know. How many times do we have to have the ‘process over product’ conversation?”

  “As many times as it takes.” I smiled.

  “I’m going in. I just wanted you to know that I had the talk with Hammon.” She was a shadow again, silhouetted in the setting sun.

  “Okay,” I said quickly, “what talk?”

  “Hammon said he’s moving on now. He said it was our turn, yours and mine. It was okay with him.”

  That was all. She went back in the house. She never brought it up again, and I never asked.

  The seeds did come up. They appeared before Thanksgiving that year. The packets had been mislabeled. They were tarragon and mint. They were the first things I planted in Lucinda’s garden, and still growing there. The tarragon was a perennial,
and the mint had only taken over one small corner of the raised bed she’d reserved for spices. We never discussed that I thought tarragon belonged in every dish, so I always wanted a fresh supply; or the recollection that Hammon had made mint juleps, his favorite dinner-party concoction, and so he always wanted plenty of mint growing in the garden.

  I pried myself away from those thoughts, sitting in the dark in my truck, and tried to stare around the side of the house, see if I could see that raised bed. But everything I saw in the dark landscape, and most of the things I couldn’t see, were haunted, wracked with longing memories.

  I was startled from my melancholy reverie by a soft voice.

  “Fever?”

  I peered toward the house to see Lucinda standing in the open doorway, squinting.

  “Yes,” I answered, disoriented.

  “What are you doing sitting out there in the dark?” she asked me, amused.

  I glanced at my watch. It was close to five in the morning.

  “What are you doing awake at this hour?” I asked.

  “Waiting for you,” she answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “When you didn’t show up for dinner, I called Skidmore. He said you were out working.”

  “I was supposed to have dinner with you,” I remembered, half-dazed.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared at her.

  “Well, come on in the house,” she said, a gentle irritation edging her words. “We’ll sort it all out together.”

  She turned and headed into her living room.

  “I don’t know why a person would sit out in the cold and dark,” she continued, mostly to herself, “when there’s a perfectly good fire in the fireplace.”

  “There’s a fire?” I called out weakly.

  “I saved you some supper too. And a piece of that apple tart you like.”

  That got me out of the truck.

  I felt my legs move the rest of me across her lawn, up the porch steps.

  “Damn it,” she said from inside.

  “What?” I quickened my pace.

  I shoved through the door and into the living room. Lucinda was sitting on the floor, poking at the fire. Her hair was pulled back and the blaze made her face flushed. The room was warm and dry; hickory and cinnamon apples filled the air. She was wearing one of her old shirts and a pair of faded gray jeans.