Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  He stepped around and let himself in with a key through the kitchen door. Everything looked disturbed, a film of dust on the counters and furniture, and yet it all looked just the same. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for beyond a better sense of who Prue had been and what she’d done. He spent a little over two and a half hours going through closets and dresser drawers. In the attic he found a stack of old photo albums, dusted for fingerprints but still there. It looked as if half the pictures were missing. Most of the remaining photographs were of open prairie, mountains he didn’t recognize, and oceans against gray-white skies. There was a series of photos, a total of five in all, shoved into a pocket in the front of one of the albums. He pulled them out to look at more closely because at first glance they reminded him in some way he couldn’t identify of the dream he’d had the night before. Though he angled them toward the window and toward the dim overhead light, it was impossible to see clearly what they were actually photographs of.

  He put all five of them in an envelope and put the envelope in his inside jacket pocket. He put everything else back the way he’d found it, walked through the house one more time, checking windows and locks and pausing briefly in the spare bedroom, but deciding that he’d have to come back again if he wanted to go through the dozen or so boxes stored there. The contents of each box had already been cataloged and he’d looked at the lists, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t something important to be found in them.

  He left the same way he’d come in and locked the door with the key he’d signed out from the office. Up on the road, near his car, hunched against the wind, a woman stood watching the house. She was young, maybe his age, maybe younger. She was dressed warmly in a heavy coat, a knit cap and scarf, but there was something about the way she wore them—the scarf wrapped tight around her neck and chin, the knit cap pulled low, the coat buttoned up like armor—that made him think she wasn’t accustomed to the weather, hadn’t been anyplace cold for a long time. The coat and cap were black, but the scarf was a bright blue, like clear summer skies. It stood out, a stark contrast to the gloomy light and winter gray.

  “Can I help you?” Boyd asked as he approached her.

  “I lived in that house once—a long time ago,” she said. “I heard there was a shooting.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Boyd said. “Do you know something that might be relevant?”

  “She was a cheater,” the woman said. Her eyes were a curious light blue, lighter than the scarf, like winter skies, the whites like old parchment. “Cheated all her life.”

  Hallie had described Prue as a cheater too. She’d gotten it from the harbinger, because, said Maker, Prue cheated Death. He wondered if she’d cheated at other things. Cheated someone who might want to kill her.

  The woman raised her hand. She wasn’t wearing gloves, and the faint thin lines of old scars crisscrossed her palm. “Will it be going on the market, you think?”

  “The house?” Someone died here, he wanted to remind her. To most people, that meant something. He had reached inside his jacket for his notebook when his radio crackled. “Davies here,” he said. It was the daytime dispatcher, Patty Littlejohn, asking him to call Ole on his cell. He pulled out his phone, said excuse me to the woman, and walked to the other side of his patrol car. When he turned around, he saw her getting into a late-model rental car. He noted the license plate, then called Ole. He didn’t expect to see her again, but it paid to take note of things.

  That night he studied the photographs he’d retrieved from Prue’s house. He got out a magnifying glass and looked at them, but they were dark and they were nothing more than pictures of sky and floors and empty walls. In two of them, he could see nothing but a blank concrete wall like a cellar maybe, though both photographs included a window well with no actual window, not even the framing—an old foundation? The photos depicted two different sections of wall, one marked with an X and the other with a circle. Each photograph had the number 6 marked in the corner with white ink.

  The third photograph was also of concrete, but for some reason—shadows or the slant of the light—Boyd was pretty sure it was a floor, not a wall. An arrow had been gouged out of the concrete, rough and obviously done in haste, but quite clear. The number 3 had been marked in the corner of the photograph, like the other two with white ink. The final two pictures were just dirt. That was it. They must have meant something to someone, but they didn’t mean anything to him.

  Finally he stacked them up and instead took the three stones from Prue’s house out of the safe in the corner of his office. They were still in their separate evidence bags, and he’d stored them on two separate shelves in the safe. He noticed when he’d picked up the second bag, the one Gerson had left at the sheriff’s office, that it vibrated, and now when he opened the bags and rolled all three stones onto his desk, he could see that all of them were vibrating, like self-powered baby rattles thrumming against the bare wood of the desk.

  He was hesitant to touch them, but he couldn’t see what the harm would be. Laddie had carried his stone around for years. Hallie said he’d tried to give it away, which meant other people had handled it, presumably without ill effects. But these were different stones, and he was a different person. What would happen to him if he picked up one of these stones?

  He studied each one with a magnifying glass. Nothing he hadn’t already seen. Nothing that made them seem any different from any other stone—smoother than some, smaller than some, possibly they were all a certain type. He could take them to the School of Mines in Rapid City. They could tell him where they’d come from and what had formed them into stone, though they wouldn’t be able to tell him about storing magic or talking with the dead or how they’d come to be vessels for holding magic. Before he could think too much, think about how he was always the careful one, about how someone else ought to be present, about how Prue Stalking Horse had died right in front of him, he picked up the smallest stone and held it in the palm of his hand.

  The vibrating slowed, then stopped altogether. He closed his hand around it. No voices, which was a relief. Nothing. Then he realized that there really was nothing. No sound at all. Not the steady push of the furnace fan, not the hum of his computer, nothing but his own breathing. He turned around, and the entire back wall of his office had disappeared. He could smell damp grass and woodsmoke, see a swath of prairie grass, but that was above him, not at his feet. The air was heavy and wet like August, though the height of the grass made it look more like late May or early June. Light came from what would have been over his left shoulder if he were actually standing wherever this was.

  There were no people in the scene in front of him. There wasn’t anything, except the prairie grass above him, a few weeds at his feet, and some broken timber framing. He was down in something, in a hole. Too big for a grave—thank God. Something moved, right across the periphery of his vision, a sound like a shout, though he couldn’t make out words. A shovel clanged against a hard surface. He took a step closer, like he really was right there, like it would be clearer if he could just get closer, and it disappeared. It was his office, a wall of bookshelves, the smell of lemon cleaner and leather.

  He blinked. He put the stone down on his desk. It vibrated quietly, like nothing had happened. He picked it up again. The same scene, like he’d turned on a television set or he’d just had one of his prescient dreams while he was standing in his office, wide awake.

  He didn’t know if it was the only thing the stone could do, the only thing it could do for him, or the only thing it would do right now. He didn’t know whether what he’d seen was dangerous or could be dangerous. He didn’t even know if the vision, or whatever it was, would come again at some time not so convenient.

  He put all three stones back in the safe, placing them all on one shelf this time, just far enough apart from each other that they didn’t rattle the papers he’d set them on. He closed the safe and locked it and studied the bookshelves in front of him as if the things he’d just seen were
still visible there.

  He didn’t know what he would find or what any of it meant. He didn’t obviously know the exact location of what he’d just seen. But he had an idea where he could start. He had the photographs from Prue’s house in addition to the scene he’d just witnessed. He’d start looking first thing in the morning, and he hoped what he’d find would tell him either something about the stones or about who had killed Prue.

  16

  The morning after everyone came for supper, Hallie fixed the gate her father had been nagging her about for months. She put the fan belt on the tractor and moved the remaining big round bales up near the horse corral. She went back inside, tore the sheets off the bed, and spent half an hour dealing with the cranky washing machine in Pabby’s utility room. She called Boyd twice, but left a message only once, and it was a stupid message—“Haven’t heard from Beth. I’ll let you know.” Stupid because it had been only about fifteen hours since she last talked to him, not even twenty-four since she last saw Beth, and pretty soon she’d be up on the roof in a windstorm, fixing loose shingles just for something to do.

  Boyd called her back around five, but she missed the call because she’d decided to see if she could saddle up the gelding, which she could, and she’d gone out to the back pasture to check on Laddie’s cattle. It had warmed up to about twenty, which felt like a heat wave, and although she was outside the hex ring, the air was clear and the world stretched out empty to the horizon. Nothing would sneak up on her here. She hoped. She had an iron poker strapped slant along the left side of the saddle and a shotgun with primed iron shot in an improvised sling on the right, and things felt, if not safe, then at least like she might go on a little longer without having to decide or have things decided for her.

  She got back to the house just as dark was closing in and discovered another note on another post down the drive. This one said—TIME RUNS OUT.

  Goddamnit.

  Inside when she checked her phone, she found two voice mails. One from Boyd asking her to meet him for breakfast the next morning at the Dove, and one from the mechanical voice, which just said—“Soon.”

  Jesus.

  The next morning, the right front tire on her truck was flat—or at least soft.

  “All right,” Boyd said when he called back, because she’d had to leave another phone message when she called him. He sounded like he didn’t quite believe her.

  “It’s flat,” she said.

  “Do you need a ride?” he asked. “I can make time.”

  “You left me a message,” she pointed out. “I saw it after I called you.”

  There was a long moment of nothing. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t offer an explanation.

  “Me too.” It felt like distance, the whole conversation, and though she wanted to tell herself that she couldn’t understand how it had happened, that distance, she knew exactly how and when and why. She told him she hadn’t heard anything from Beth—she hadn’t tried to get in touch with her either, which she didn’t say. She hoped Beth couldn’t open the door, and she knew she should be doing something about it, but she wasn’t. She told herself it was because she didn’t know what to do, though she knew that wasn’t it. Boyd told her he’d tracked down the phone number in St. Paul, the one Prue called that last night, and that he’d gone through Prue’s house again, but he didn’t tell her whom the number had belonged to or what he’d found. Hallie didn’t ask him because … she didn’t.

  She changed the tire, glad she had a regular spare in pretty good shape, and spent the afternoon making iron shot primed with her own blood—dead man’s blood—and sacrament. In case she needed them.

  She hadn’t seen Maker for a couple of days, which wasn’t unusual. It was still a harbinger, still had obligations to Death, even if it seemed to go back and forth more or less as it pleased. She’d asked if it didn’t mean other things could go back and forth. Maker had unhelpfully told her, “Yes, but they don’t.”

  She spent the evening pacing from the living room to the office through the dining room and back. She put on her jacket and lined leather work gloves and went outside and walked the entire perimeter of the hex ring. She felt trapped. Boyd was busy with a murder investigation that might have a supernatural element; there was certainly magic at Prue’s house in the shape of the stones they’d found. But what that meant and whether it had gotten Prue killed, wasn’t at all clear. She told herself that she wanted to help Beth—hell, she’d told Beth she wanted to help—but she wasn’t actually helping. Ghosts were no longer following her, or at least she hadn’t seen one in weeks. She was more or less okay in the daytime, or at least she told herself she was, but at night the walls of the world seemed to close in and she was sure that would be when Death would appear, in the dark, or in her dreams.

  Something had changed for her after the events of the last few months and especially after she’d watched Boyd die. The idea that if she moved forward fast enough, if she fought hard enough, things would be okay, didn’t feel like enough anymore. Sure, Boyd was fine. Both of them were alive. That hadn’t changed. And yet, it felt to Hallie as if it could change at any time.

  She didn’t sleep well that night, hardly slept at all, and in the morning she left the ranch as soon as she finished feeding and watering the horses, even though she wasn’t entirely certain where she was going. Hiding wasn’t the answer. Everyone who’d ever lived behind the hex ring had learned that sooner or later. The ring could keep you safe from reapers and black dogs and maybe even Death, but safety wasn’t enough, not for a lifetime, not even for a few months.

  She’d just pulled onto the county road when three deer ran across in front of her, fast, with their white tails flying. Hallie scanned the fields, but she couldn’t see anything chasing them, nothing but a couple of distant trees and the dried brown grass that had snapped over as the deer passed.

  She took the first turn onto the county road, away from West Prairie City, toward Old PC, but then turned onto a gravel road a quarter mile later. Thin clouds lay across the early morning sun, so the day looked flat, what little color there was in the landscape leached away.

  Eventually, she came to the cemetery down past Thorsen and Bear Creek, where her sister, Dell, and her mother were buried. She’d been headed there the whole time, since she left the ranch, though she hadn’t admitted it. She pulled into the gravel parking lot, the whole world empty as far as she could see, except her truck, the grave markers, and three bare trees. There was no wind, the temperature around fifteen, everything still like a collective intake of breath.

  Hallie pulled on gloves and a baseball cap, pulled the collar of her jacket close up around her neck, and got out of the truck. Gravel crunched under her boots as she walked. At the edge of the lot she stopped, as if she’d just bumped up against an invisible fence. There was no way she could actually visit her sister’s grave or her mother’s, had never even seen her sister’s grave marker. When she entered a cemetery, any cemetery, ghosts rose from their graves and surrounded her, leached the warmth from her bones until she could barely move. These graveyard ghosts were different from the ones that followed her, than Dell’s ghost or Lily’s or Eddie’s. Dell and Lily and Eddie had wanted something, some unfinished business in the world, something that needed to be fixed or said or uncovered. The graveyard ghosts were more like old memories attracted to her warmth, to her ability to see them, to whatever attracted the dead to her. They were cold and they made her cold, though they’d once saved her life and, by extension, the world.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  She said it out loud as if saying it would provide the answer. It wasn’t strictly true. She did know what to do. All the world required was that she go forward. Not that she be right. Or do the right thing. Just move.

  What she couldn’t say, at least not out loud, was what she actually meant: I don’t want to die. It didn’t seem all that controversial. Most people, she assumed, didn’t want to die. But it was new for
her, unsettling. In the army, she hadn’t thought about it one way or another, hadn’t believed that it was possible for her, specifically, to die. She believed people died, of course. She’d seen people die. She just hadn’t believed she would be one of them. Even dying and coming back hadn’t changed anything, not really. She hadn’t remembered dying. She hadn’t remembered coming back.

  Now it was like she kept dying over and over, kept reliving the moment when Hollowell had killed Boyd—the moment of death—though it had turned out fine, had been the right decision. She’d seen people die before that moment. People she liked. People who meant a lot to her. But not when she could help it. Not when she could have acted and didn’t. Hallie acted. That was how she knew herself.

  She had acted in the end. She’d let it go as far as it did only so she could kill Hollowell. She’d done the right thing. Boyd agreed she’d done the right thing.

  So why did it feel like betrayal and failure?

  Because it did.

  Without warning, ghosts flew up in front of her, ghosts from every gravestone. Ghost upon ghost upon ghost, like a rush of frightened birds. Hallie stepped back, thinking she’d misjudged the line and entered the cemetery without knowing it. But the ghosts continued to rise, like battering against walls, hurling themselves against invisible barriers. She took two more steps back. The fireplace poker was in the truck behind the seat, five steps away. Might as well be half a world.

  The ghosts split apart suddenly, straining away from their gravestones, which was when she saw it, a black shadow moving straight toward her.