“Trouble,” Betsy muttered to herself. “A skinny woman ain’t never been nothing but trouble.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
October was a melancholy month for Alex Eakins.
It was the month his childhood mutt rolled himself under the wheels of a Fed Ex van, the month he’d lost his virginity after a high school football game to a girl who later ditched him for a married man, the month his dad and mom separated, the month he’d been kicked out of Duke for lousy grades and poor attendance. Since he’d moved to the mountains and spent his trust fund on a little piece of south-facing land on the mountain above Solom, this had always been a season of dying.
He sniffed the air, which was sweet with the sugar of red maples and crabapples. The stench of decay should have been there, but the only rot came from the black innards of his composting toilet, where bacteria performed its thankless job of turning shit to dirt. Nature was just beginning to accept that winter was on the way, that every living thing would soon be asleep or dead. He wondered which of those he would be.
Alex embraced organic gardening as a lifestyle, earning enough by selling produce at the county farmer’s market to pay his property taxes. He studied all the latest sustainable building techniques, and his own house was a mix of technologies both primitive and new. Since he lived off-grid and wasn’t beholden to the building inspection and permitting process, Alex used cob and straw bale construction for much of his house, which was cut partly into the bank for better heat retention.
From the outside, the structure looked as much like an aboriginal mud hut as anything, but it was highly energy efficient. A small cluster of solar panels on the roof ran a compact refrigerator, and a wood stove system circulated hot water through the house. Alex had fixed a generator to a paddle wheel in the creek that gushed along one side of his property. The generator, along with a miniature wind turbine, fed a bank of alternating-current batteries, so he was covered no matter what the weather.
The system was put together in the aftermath of Y2K, when all the doomsayers realized the world wasn’t going to end after all and sold their survival gear on the cheap. Well, the world may have ended already, for all Alex knew. Because it was autumn again, and the tomatoes were turning to mush on the vines and the corn was getting hard. The cool-weather greens like collards, spinach, and turnips still had a few weeks to go, but soon enough the market would close for the season. Alex had a truckload of pumpkins to sell for Halloween, and one more good haul of organic broccoli, but after that, he would have to go back to work. Or else sell a little of the marijuana he cultivated.
But that meant dealing with people.
The same idiotic people who had driven him to the isolation of his mountain retreat. Despite the added pleasure of end-running the government and the lure of the world’s last free-market economy, selling dope was almost as much trouble as having a square job. When all of that ruckus erupted on the Smith farm last year and cops were everywhere, Alex was sure he’d end up getting busted, but they’d merely questioned him about Gordon Smith’s death.
After he’d played the “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” stoned monkey for them, they’d left him alone. But he learned enough to figure out the professor was killed by his wife’s first husband. Sounded like some kind of soap-opera shit, but you had to admire a guy who burned with that kind of passion, even though they’d eventually ruled the death a case of self-defense. But all those rumors about Gordon dressing up as a scarecrow were kind of creepy.
Alex dumped a bucket of table scraps onto his garden compost heap and looked over the valley below. The trees were just starting to turn color along the highway, where the roots were stressed by construction and carbon monoxide. A gravel road ran past the Ward and Smith houses before disappearing into the thicket and winding up to Alex’s house.
The road got a lot bumpier and rutted past the Smith farm, because Alex believed in inhibiting curiosity-seekers. Not because he was antisocial as his mom claimed, or a stubborn asshole as his dad claimed, but because he didn’t have the patience to deal with accidental tourists and uninvited guests. Plus, the government might have an interest in finding him.
Besides, he wasn’t antisocial. Just ask Meredith, the earth chick he’d met at the farmer’s market who’d occupied half of his bed on and off since April. But April was a green month and October was red and golden, so he expected her to light out before the first big frost.
Her voice came from the wooden deck. “Honey?”
Honey. That reminded him, next year he planned on setting up a honeybee hive. With all the pests that attacked honeybees, the real stuff was getting more and more valuable. Alex was sure he could do it right, and have the fringe benefit of his own tiny, winged army of blossom pollinators—
“Alex?”
He put down the scrap bucket and picked up the heavy hoe. “Yes, dear?”
“Are you mad at me about something?”
“Of course not.” Down below, through the trees, a thread of gray smoke rose from the Ward chimney.
“You only call me ‘Dear’ when you’re mad at me.”
“That’s not so.”
“And you say it out the side of your mouth, like you’re talking on automatic or something. Like you’re miles away.”
Gasoline was pushing four bucks a gallon, thanks to the military-industrial complex that ruled the country, and that had to be factored against the profit from a load of pumpkins. Maybe he’d drive the load to Westridge. The college kids had plenty of money. He should know, as much grass as he’d peddled to them over the last couple of years. “Everything’s fine, dear.”
“See? There you go again.”
“Huh?”
“You said ‘Dear’ again.”
He turned and squinted up at the deck. The day was bright, though cool. Meredith stood in a gray terry-cloth robe, her blonde hair wet and steaming. No doubt she was nude beneath, and Alex thought of those nipples that were the color and consistency of pencil erasers. He could almost smell her shampoo, the hippie-dippy expensive stuff she bought at the health food store. He tightened his grip on the hoe.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about autumn.”
“Like, fall?”
“Yeah. Everything’s dying but there’s a promise of rebirth. It’s metaphorical.”
“Alex, have you been in the stash?”
“Did you know that most leaves aren’t really green? The chlorophyll in the leaves masks their true color, and when the growing process slows down for autumn, the chlorophyll fades and the true color emerges. It’s the process of dying that finally reveals the leaf. So all that green, happy horseshit is a lie.”
“Alex? Are you okay?”
Sure, he was okay. He’d been okay for years. Marijuana was his antidepressant, and his crop kept him supplied year-round. He also traded on the black market to support his other little hobby-the one locked in the walk-in closet downstairs—but figured he’d probably get caught one day and the cops would seize his land.
All because he liked to smoke a little weed, which was none of the government’s business besides the fact that it kept neo-cons in office with their permanent War on Drugs. At least weed was honest, though the system wasn’t. Weed stayed green, even after it was dead, even after you smoked it and it grew a bouquet of blossoms in your head.
True colors don’t stay hidden for long.
Meredith smoked it, too, but only before bed, because it made her terribly horny. In fact, Alex often wondered if that was the sole reason she stayed over that night in April, and then the next night, and before the end of the week she’d begun leaving her clothes in his dresser. And that, as any guy knew, was the time to say he wasn’t sure they were ready for such a commitment, but another joint and Alex’s head was diving between her thighs and, well, he supposed it could be worse. At least she could cook vegan.
He smiled up at her, or maybe he was grimacing from dawn’s glare in his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said.
“I was just wondering whether to take the pumpkins down to the college or try my luck at the market.”
“The market’s been a little slow, and some of the other vendors will probably undercut you. Better to go where there’s no competition.”
“Makes sense.” Meredith possessed a business degree, graduating cum laude the year before with a degree in marketing. Alex had majored in botany, but all he’d learned was how to grow some high-class, kick-ass grass. And how to flunk out and disappoint his parents.
“Are you going into town?” Meredith asked. “Town” meant Titusville, the Pickett County seat, which was fifteen miles away. No one thought of Solom as a town, although it had a zip code and post office. Titusville was where people did their serious shopping, and the Solom General Store was a place to pop in for vegetable seeds, or a bag of Fritos corn chips and a Snickers bar when the munchies got extreme.
“Maybe later,” he said. He never wore a watch, and if he was forced to get a part-time gig for the winter, that meant showing up according to some corporate master’s rigid timetable. Time was flexible and shouldn’t be tied down to numbers.
Like, this was now and later was later, and yesterday was like the ashes and grunge in the bottom of the bong. And, tomorrow was, like, maybe a pot seed or something.
“Well, then, what do you want to do this fine Saturday morning?” Meredith leaned over the deck, letting her robe fall open and offering a generous view that rivaled the glory of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
He grinned, or maybe a gnat was flitting near his eyes. “Roll one and I’ll come up in a minute.”
She smiled. “Breakfast in bed?”
“Sure—” He started to add “dear,” but caught himself.
Meredith padded across the deck Alex built with his own two hands using wormy chestnut planks he’d taken from an abandoned barn. Maybe Meredith belonged here. She was organic in her way, wasn’t spoiled by modern conveniences, and had grown on him over the months. He just couldn’t understand why, as she’d talked to him, his grip on the hoe tightened. He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white.
“Yes, dear,” he whispered, chopping at a plantain that had taken root by the garden. Plantains carried the same blight that killed tomatoes in wet weather. They were evil weeds if God had ever made such a thing.
Alex lifted the hoe for a second blow when he saw a skewed stand of stalks at the end of his garden. Something had been in his corn. He stepped over the rows of broccoli and walked past the beds of young spinach, his blood rising to a boil. The corn was trampled and the tops bitten off a number of the plants. Deer sometimes came through the woods to feast on the garden, though their visits dwindled after Alex picked up a tip from a fellow organic gardener. A little human piss around the garden’s perimeter kept deer away, because as dumb as the dark-eyed creatures were, they’d been around long enough to associate people with murder.
This wasn’t deer damage. Because a slew of stalks were littered along the fence that separated his property line from the Smith farm.
Alex was ambivalent about fences, since Starship Earth belonged to everybody, although he’d made damned sure he knew his property boundaries after the survey was complete. He believed in the laws of Nature, but that didn’t mean the rest of his nasty, grab-assed species did. They believed in pieces of paper in the courthouse, or pieces of paper in banks, or pieces of paper in Washington, D.C.
But, paper or not, one thing was for sure: goats couldn’t read, and even if they could, Alex would bet half a kilo of homegrown that they would ignore what was written on the deed anyway. He kept a tight grip on the hoe just in case one of the weird-eyed bastards was still around.
The wire fence was bent just a little, as if something heavy had leaned on it. Heavier than a goat, by the looks of it. Alex hesitated. He tried to live in harmony with the world, even if six-and-a-half billion hairless apes threatened to make the place uninhabitable. He could either go down and have a talk with Gordon Smith’s widow, or he could cross no-man’s land into enemy territory and administer some mountain justice.
“Alexxxxxx!” From the purr in Meredith’s voice, Alex guessed she’d already fired up the joint. He dropped the hoe.
“I’ll be back,” he said to the woods beyond the fence.
CHAPTER NINE
“Don’t get any ideas,” Katy said as she pulled the Subaru up to Mark’s rental cabin.
Jett looked over from the passenger seat with a twinkle her in eye. “What kind of ideas?”
“You know.”
“Hey, you’re the one that fell in love with him and bred.”
“That was a long time ago and things happened.”
Addiction happened. Emotional distance happened. Divorce happened. And then the long and winding road led to Gordon Smith and this haunted piece of Solom real estate she couldn’t afford to abandon, even with all the controversy and whispers and suspicion.
“Well, now it’s now and new things can happen,” Jett said.
“That ship not only sailed, it took on water and broke up on the shoals, honey.”
“I see the way you look at him.”
Mark came out on the cabin porch and waved. She couldn’t help the way she looked at him. “It’s because I see you in him. Nothing will ever change that.”
Jett leaned over and kissed Katy on the cheek, which surprised her. Jett was in a bit of a “no touchy” phase, especially in front of other people. As Jett opened the door and slid out of the car, Katy wondered if maybe the affection was a little show for Mark.
She rolled her window down. “I’ll be back in two hours.”
“Why don’t you join us?” Mark said.
He looked healthy and tan, his hair ruffled as if he’d been out splitting firewood. The outdoor jobs he’d taken combined with his recovery to fill out the shoulders of his plaid shirt. His jeans seemed to fit better, too, not that she could afford a full survey. She could almost smell him, at least the memory of him.
“Some other time,” she said. “I’ve got errands.”
She drove away before he could respond, glancing in the rearview mirror to see if he was watching. But he’d already draped his arm around Jett to lead her into the cabin, where they’d have lunch and play Boggle and listen to Jett’s new favorite band, Death Cab for Cutie. According to Jett, Mark had taken an interest in bluegrass and traditional mountain music and even bought himself a dulcimer.
Katy wasn’t sure if his transformation was all an act. Perhaps risking his life for them awakened him to the things he truly valued. Or maybe this was just another mask, one as creepy as Gordon Smith’s hideous burlap sack with the burned-out eyeholes.
The drive to Windshake was pleasant, affording her a chance to appreciate the Blackburn River Valley and the autumnal splendor of the wooded slopes. The hayfields were golden with a ripe harvest, but the gardens were down to little more than cabbages and pole beans. Cattle milled across the lowland pastures, the herds not yet thinned for the winter. Despite temperatures in the sixties, thin gray threads of smoke arose from the occasional farmhouse chimney.
Titusville was the county seat, but only because it was the geographic center of the county. Its population was barely ten thousand, although a business strip had grown up along the route to the county courthouse, sheriff’s department, jail, and hospital. The usual chain outlets had popped up their standardized presences, with Wal-Mart, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Dollar General, and McDonald’s joining the few locally owned small businesses that struggled to survive in their shadows.
She parked at the courthouse, easily finding a parking spot. No meters, either. In Charlotte, parking was a blood sport and often required the giving of a kidney.
The desk clerk in the sheriff’s office recognized her—of course she would, considering Katy was the most sensational thing to happen to county law enforcement in years—and said, “He’s waiting, Mrs. Smith, please go on in.”
“It’s ‘Logan,” she said, keeping it ple
asant despite her annoyance. Hadn’t her name been on enough police reports, court documents, and newspaper pages?
Sheriff Frank Littlefield was waiting by his office door and ushered her in. He was tall and strong-jawed but not a caricature of the country cop, with a thin face, working-class hands, and a hound dog aspect to his eyes that made him seem constantly sad. She’d heard he’d endured some tragedies of his own. Or maybe he was dismayed to see her again.
“We have no new information, Ms. Logan,” he said, waiting for her to sit before settling behind his desk. “No motive for your husband’s behavior.”
“I know his family has deep roots here, and I understand you want to downplay the whole thing,” she said, choosing her words carefully, She didn’t want to accuse him of a cover-up, because she was just as happy if no one dug too deeply, or she’d have to start testifying about headless ghosts and a supernatural preacher seeking vengeance. “We’re eager to move on, too.”
He scratched the buzz cut above one ear. “All the evidence backed up your story,” he said. “If not for your first husband’s criminal record, it probably would have wrapped up faster, but you know how people are. Especially as respected as the Smith family name is. I couldn’t let people think I buried it.”
“That’s odd. From what I can tell, most people in Solom weren’t all that surprised when Gordon Smith was skewered by a wooden pole out in his own cornfield.”
“People talk,” Sheriff Littlefield said. “Those old stories about Harmon Smith have been around forever.”
“And I gather every time somebody dies mysteriously or violently, old Harmon gets the credit.”
“There haven’t been many on my watch,” the sheriff said, with a touch of defiance, as if he couldn’t be expected to protect his constituents from the creatures of legend.
“One of them was on your watch, though. Gordon’s first wife Rebecca.”
The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 2) Page 4
