Dark & Disorderly

by Bernita Harris

  “That one couldn’t tell her ass from a hole in the ground. Museum donation. Curse stones. Just a minute. I’ll ask the wife.”

  After a bellow and a mumbled exchange he got back to me.

  “Name of O’Dea, James O’Dea, but that won’t help you. The wife tells me the old bugger’s been dead ten years or more. Just a minute.”

  More muffled mumbles. I drew interlocking circles and figure eights on my notepad.

  “Lillie, the wife says she’s got some old minutes from the society, proceedings and such, stashed away in the attic. She’ll look through them for you as soon as she has time to spare, if that’ll help.”

  “I appreciate that, Ted. Thank her for me. It’s not an urgent matter though. Have I got it right? You did say the name was O’Dea?”

  O’Dea. It fitted. Maybe the missing stones were not so coincidental, after all. I would have to visit Cemetery Hill. Definitely.

  “Yep. Barely remember him myself, a bit of a recluse. Nice old guy, the wife says, a scholar and a gentleman. Last of the family. Say, Lillie, I know you don’t watch much TV but…did you catch the news last night?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t trust myself to say anything more.

  “Sonsabitches,” added Ted as I said goodbye.

  My sentiments, exactly.

  I’d be lucky if the town council didn’t move to cancel my contract. There’d be fallout from that showing, noises about the town’s image. If they blamed me for the riot and indirectly for the damage to the courthouse, this could well be a final straw.

  I dragged a file from the pile and reread the detail on the next priority case, the one concerning the private cemetery that the Planning department wanted resolved ASAP, according to yesterday’s memo. This time, some dear and sensible soul in planning had attached a map to the memo with a convenient X marking the spot. And this time there seemed to be no dissenting voices; every party was in full accord.

  I entered the name of the cemetery at my favorite research site and printed out a list of names collected by amateur genealogists who pursued old graveyards with practical passion.

  The case didn’t appear complicated. Simple dispatch of any resident ghosts, familial or otherwise, and a declaration that the site was clean and clear of spiritual residue. I made a note to warn them of itinerants and wandering ghosts who might make an appearance between my exorcism and any relocation of crumbling bones and tombstones, as well as during the removal and the bulldozing. Empty places didn’t always stay empty. Old lovers, old haters, the lost and lonely.

  I would have to take care in my report to disabuse the “haunted graveyard” notion, yet again, and explain, yet again, that not all ghosts—in fact, few—were tied to their gravesites. I would also have to make it clear that my exorcism guaranteed removal of any spirits resident at the time of my visit and from the specific location only, and did not constitute or include a blanket exorcism of the entire development plan.

  I taped a note to my screen that stated I had gone out on a case and would be unavailable for the afternoon. To avoid any repeat of yesterday, this time I did not say where.

  I stopped by the florist and ordered flowers. I specified lilies. No card. His widow, Jennie, would know who sent them. Better yet, lovely girl that she was, she would understand why the anonymity. In a day or two they’d hold a wake for Bobby, with a picture of him in uniform and grin. I didn’t think I’d be welcomed by many of the mourners. People here still thought small-town thoughts, though this was no longer a small town. My presence would make them uncomfortable and, God knows, wakes and funerals are uncomfortable enough. No official ban barred the likes of me from attending the rituals of farewell, but since my Talent could dispatch the last remnant spirit of a loved one, it was not considered in the best of taste to appear.

  Then I drove to the garden center and bought two pots of lilies and a new trowel. No doubt the rest of her bones had been decently re-interred by now, her grave on Cemetery Hill refilled and made tidy again. I didn’t think the lily shoots would survive. They were probably buried deep around her bones when they replaced the earth. Her fragile skull probably hadn’t survived the fire and ensuing riot.

  I though she should still have her lilies. For no other reason than the name, I felt I owed her that.

  The other pot was for Nathan’s grave. No one had told me what they did with animated corpses after they had been de-animated. Whether they just shoved them quietly back in the ground and covered them up again or whether there were protocols to follow. Surely, there were. Surely, I would be notified. I would have to make inquiries. In any event the plant would keep.

  I owed Nathan lilies too. Out of spite.

  19.

  The tiny cemetery sat at the foot of a sloping knoll on the westerly side of a concession road. Back before the forest was driven back and the fields were fully cleared, they kept their dead close.

  A decrepit rail fence and a broken line of trees isolated the enclave from a barren, undulating cornfield and marked the swerve of the plows around it. Orange ribbons on survey stakes fluttered like struggling birds. The guts of a television cabinet and torn green garbage bags decorated the side of the road near the crumbling crossway.

  Homestead site, if the lilac bushes and the dun matted carpet of daylily stalks flanking the old crossway were any indication. One seldom encountered the residue of a pioneer homestead without one or both. I reminded myself of the dangers of abandoned wells. Very likely the remains of a cellar lurked amid the brambles, scrub brush, sumac and buckthorn crowning the flat top of the hill. Young cedars and poplars straggled down the slope to encroach on the rutted, grassy drive.

  I got out of the car and crossed the road.

  The little graveyard was dreadfully neglected.

  Gravestones leaned and tilted, among them three of prosperous red granite. I counted a dozen of various sizes and shapes, some toppled and barely visible through the brown winter wrack of weeds, wildflowers and rusty graveyard ivy. Judging from the regular, sunken hollows in the ground there had been once more graves and gravestones than my total. Since we have an aversion to leaving the dead nameless, I thought some must have been removed to another cemetery sometime in the past.

  Small mounds of raw earth and pebbles marked miniature souterrains where woodchucks made their burrows. I reminded myself sharply that groundhogs were herbivores. The bottom half of a broken beer bottle decorated the base stone of the nearest monument. I doubted it represented a libation in honor of the dead.

  At one time, a low iron railing with decorative finials had surrounded the plot. I discovered that fact when I tripped over a portion of it while trying to avoid the thorny, waving branches of a briar rose. I wondered what color the bush would display in bloom. More than the most heart-rending inscriptions carved below lambs and doves, more than anything, the last gift, the living sorrow of grave plantations, makes me sad.

  At first I thought the old site was empty. But it wasn’t. An old man leaned against the fence watching out over the fields, shielding his eyes from the sun like me. I heard a woman calling.

  I tramped back through the tangle to the midpoint of the site, turned the four quarters slowly and read out the names from my list of generations. As I named them I mentally added the epitaphic designations of grief and loss: the beloved, the wife of, the only son of, the dear daughter of. Ephraim Bryant, Ebenezer Bryant, Joshua Tilden, Mary Tilden, Annabel Bryant…

  Three shades only, worn and thin, drifted toward me, like silver whispers in the quiet gold of the afternoon.

  I dispatched them. Reluctantly. Regretfully. An easy task this time.

  Then I went and climbed over the fence and sat on a rock in the sunshine near where the old man had stood vigil, between a bilberry bush in white blossom and a rusted harrow netted in blackberry brambles.

  Was what I was doing the right thing? Godforsaken or not, the spirits who lingered here in this abandoned, lonely little hill would harm no one who came after. Had it
been wrong to banish them, to use my Talent on such frail and harmless spirits? Were the SOS right in their vociferous protests against the actions of my kind?

  I sat there a long time, pulling at the dead grass by my feet, listening to the busy chirps of gossiping sparrows, looking over the unleavened fields beyond, the nearest covered with pale dry cornstalks beaten into the earth like bones. A red-winged blackbird swayed on a cattail along a tiny creek. A flight of swallows dipped and danced like souls released.

  Within weeks the ground would be plowed and turned by backhoes and bulldozers. This hillock leveled, the little stream diverted. The land would sprout wooden skeletons that in time become houses. The land would lie under them, under streets and driveways, like a corpse crypted in concrete. Just like the rival development I could see taking shape in the distance.

  Some people would make neat little gardens in their small lots, like apologetic ghosts of what was before. Some would plant trees. But the people who had once worked and loved these fields would be gone as if they had never been. I had made certain of that.

  I could only hope what the bean sidhe said was true. That the dead are grateful for rest.

  Remembrance of the dead should be more than forgotten names cold-chiseled on a hidden surface of some arrogant mausoleum or re-allocated gravestones crumbling quietly in an obscure corner of some shiny new mortuary garden. I owed these gentle spirits a personal memory, and so I began to search.

  On the sunny slope between the little graveyard and the house foundation, a small kitchen garden once flourished around a wellhead, marked now by spindly poplars and an apple tree mostly dead, though a couple of low branches showed leaves and swelling buds. The well, dug where they had tapped a spring, had been properly secured by a cement cap, and when I paced around it I detected what I sought by the aromatic scent that wafted upward.

  At my feet, the purple green of mint shoots pushed vigorously through the winter litter of desiccated brown leaves. I pinched a shoot and inhaled deeply. Named for Minthe, the nymph cursed by Persephone, jealous half wife of Hades, god of the underworld, mint had been a favorite in classical funerary rites and mysteries because its strength and clarity of scent implied hopes for an afterlife. It seemed appropriate. Nearby, bound in the long grass, I found a discarded plastic cup. Ignoring the chattered insults and indignant tail of a black squirrel from overhead, I dug up a spearmint root from beside the well to take home.

  Not rosemary, but a remembrance.

  Traffic had been sparse on this side road. I heard a vehicle slow. I slunk behind a clump of young cedar.

  A familiar black SUV pulled quietly onto the gravel verge in front of my car and Johnny Thresher slid from behind the wheel with that smooth, coordinated efficiency that made me think of special ops and security details. Maybe it was the polished black shoes, the dark suit, the dark sweater under it and the sunglasses.

  He scrutinized my car, and then scanned the hillside. I moved out from my cover and started down the drive. When he caught sight of me, he removed his hand from inside his jacket and strode across. His aura leaped to meet me and then retreated behind its usual blue ring. We met by the culvert. A leopard frog vaulted and rippled through the green scum in the ditch.

  “Trouble?”

  “No. Trouble?” I ignored the sparkle that ran along my skin when he came near. I could be brusque too.

  “You’ve been out here a long time.”

  “How did you know where to find me? I didn’t leave directions. Deliberately, as a matter of fact.”

  He inspected me as he had my rental. “You have a GPS anti-theft in your vehicle. It feeds back and displays the position of the vehicle and its coordinates on a map.”

  I cast a Luddite look at my little blue compact, smug in the sunshine. I had picked it because it looked inconspicuous. Common make, common color. Instead, I’d acquired a car with a bloody beacon that tracked my every movement.

  “So, anyone who wants to can find me?”

  “If they have access, yes.”

  “I see you got your gun back.” I wanted to let him know I’d noticed.

  His presence meant trouble of some kind. After all, it has been almost twenty-four hours since the last shocking, unsettling, damn-near-disaster event—seventeen if I counted the ten o’clock news. I wondered what was coming down now and if he’d tell me. Need-to-know seemed to filter every word he spoke. It pissed me off.

  He turned, folded his arms and waited while an old red pickup truck, with a yellow dog leaning out of the box, geared down and rolled slowly toward us. A brown middle-aged face under a baseball cap stared deliberately. A slight girl, a large man, on a quiet road.

  I smiled and waved at the driver to let him know that no assault or abduction was in progress. I got a nod and a salute in return as the driver shifted gears and sped up again. The yellow pup barked once and went back to savoring the wind.

  “I’m allowed to possess and have a permit to carry more than one firearm.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Why are you here?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Your vehicle had been stationary for over two hours. You might have run into the same exorcism trouble you had yesterday and needed assistance.”

  For no good, sound reason, his damsel-in-distress implication made me contrary. Which was stupid. During my months with Nathan, I’d been constantly hurt and disappointed over his selfishness, his lack of consideration, his absence of concern for me. Of course, I understood now I had been just a convenience, but the knowledge didn’t erase the hurt and made my instant truculence toward Johnny seem all the more silly. Johnny Thresher had proved to be a useful guy to have around. I’d been very glad he’d been at hand yesterday and the day before. Maybe it was because I didn’t like talking to sunglasses. Or maybe I was wary of the way he made me feel.

  “Thoughtful of you.” I sounded tart.

  I was damned sure he had a solid reason, besides the flattering concern for my well-being, for running me down. One probably related to the investigation at hand. I fished for my keys in my pocket and waited for him to fill the silence. Two could use that particular interrogation technique.

  “The last house is half a mile away. It’s a pretty deserted spot. What sent you out here?”

  “The Planning department. They have a hungry developer on their heels. The cemetery’s in the way of progress. They wanted the site cleared of any entities that might give a backhoe driver a heart attack.”

  “Hunh. I thought you didn’t like planning problems.”

  Surprised he’d remembered that. “I don’t. I’ve been burned. They always try to sneak in broad applications. They can’t seem to help it. Once I had to tramp the whole of a 250-acre farm, including seven dilapidated and malodorous outbuildings, two woodlots and a swamp. I have no desire to repeat the experience. That’s only one of the reasons I don’t like Planning department cases, but today posed no problem—of that sort. “

  “You have much trouble working with the municipality in general?”

  “Not really. More with some people’s prejudices than anything, but you meet that anywhere. Not everyone can adjust to the idea, or even the necessity, of a ghost buster paid for by their budget, their taxes. The usual. It’s a job,” I said over my shoulder. I crossed the pavement to my car, unlocked it and leaned in to put the cup of roots on the floor of the backseat, next to the pots of lilies.

  “And probably the only one I’m good at or fitted for,” I added as I straightened.

  “So you’re satisfied with your present employment and these minor domestic exorcisms? Do you find them enough of a challenge? You must want more in life than that. Not thinking of making a move elsewhere?” He shut the car door for me.

  What did I want? What everyone does, I supposed. To be valued and respected. To not go down into the eventual dark unloved. From the present wreckage of my life that was the route I was headed. I stared up at him. He’d stretched an arm across the roof of the car and leane
d closer. He seemed to be regarding me intently. Damn those sunglasses. I couldn’t read his eyes.

  “That’s a funny question. I’m on contract. Contracts can be canceled on a whim, or not renewed. What are you getting at?”

  It was a leap but the TV clip was on my mind. I sagged back against the car door. The skin over my stomach quivered.

  “Oh. I see. The protest and that god-awful news story, I suppose. You’ve heard something. I take it I’m losing my job. Jobs,” I amended. A contract cancellation by the council would affect my police contract, and vice versa. Zombies, riots. The hits just kept coming.

  I brushed a hand across my face and gazed up at the hill. Ironic that I’d been pondering the ethics of my profession a bare half hour ago. A moot exercise, it appeared.

  A momentary and very bleak vision intruded: myself, despised and unemployable, years hence, holed up in my little house, surrounded by twenty-nine stray cats, forty-nine stray dogs and an equal number of homeless ghosts that I’d gathered for company.

  “I’ve heard nothing of the sort. I had a different reason entirely for my question.” Johnny took off his sunglasses and slid them in a pocket. His eyes blazed blue.

  “You have petals in your hair again,” he said.

  He reached out and gathered me against him, full and tight, bent his head.

  “Lillie.” He said it like a spell and brought his mouth down on mine. Deliberately, thoroughly, expertly. The sort of kiss I’d dreamed of and never had. Lightning strikes. Solar flares. Fire. Fusion. Locked in strong arms, against a hard body, all and thoroughly male, I melted like wax.

  He took his mouth away to trail his lips across my cheek, along my throat. “I’ve been wanting to do this,” he murmured, and found my mouth again.