Dead Man's Song pd-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Like reverse ecoterrorism,” Diego said, trying for a joke.

  “If it was something different in our soil it would show,” she said, shaking her head in frustration, “but it doesn’t.”

  “Nope,” Diego agreed. After twenty years he still had that East Texas drawl. “I was talking to Spence the other day,” he said, referring to Todd Spencer, his counterpart on the Kendall farm, “and he was saying that there was not one single stalk that didn’t show signs of root worm. Not one. They’re going to have to burn the whole crop, and this is weird because as you know they’re growing that Mon 863, that insect-resistant corn from Canada. Shouldn’t be even a small percentage of root worm over there.”

  “And we have no traces at all of them.” Val shivered in the freshening breeze. “That’s really weird, Dee.”

  “No joke,” Diego agreed. There was a rustle behind them and they turned to see the stalks snapping back over the passage of something that moved quickly through the rows. “Deer,” he said, shrugging it away. He went back to collecting soil samples, but Val continued to stare at the spot where they’d heard the rustle, frowning. Then she took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out through he nose as if to cleanse herself of her jumpiness. Her cell phone rang, startling her.

  “Hey, baby,” Crow said and the day seemed to brighten for her.

  “Hey yourself. I was going to call you soon. I need an insanity break.”

  “You mean a sanity—”

  “You heard me.”

  “Nice to be appreciated for one’s talents. Anyway, honey-chile, I just called to check in. Mike and I finished his first lesson in Kickass 101.”

  “How’d he do?”

  “Metza-metz. Started off by fighting me tooth and nail about even discussing it, let alone giving it a try, but he came around. Kid is seriously spooked, though. Vic Wingate has really done a number on him.”

  “Uh-oh, I’m hearing that Captain Avenger tone in your voice,” she warned.

  “Me? I wouldn’t lay a finger on him,” Crow said, then in a stage whisper added, “the slimy shit-eating bastard.”

  “Tch-tch,” Val said, but in her heart she agreed with Crow. “Well, maybe one of these days karma will drop a transmission on him at the shop.”

  “From your lips to Kali’s ears. On the upside, we did have a good session after he got into gear. Kid has some good reflexes. Really good, actually.”

  “Honey…do you think you can teach him enough to do any good?”

  Crow made a noncommittal noise. “Time will tell,” he said, and then changed tack. “So, how are you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess. I’m out in the fields with Dee. Taking samples and such.” She sighed. “And this afternoon I’ll be setting up for the funeral tomorrow. God, this is so weird. I’m doing ordinary farm stuff one minute and the next I’m planning how to memorialize my dad.”

  “I’m meeting that reporter out there at four. You want me to be there earlier?”

  “No. I’ve got Diego and the guys.” She told him about the plans, finding a strange sort of calm in the mundane details.

  “Well, if you need me there today, sweetie, I’m there. You sound pretty wired.”

  “Thanks, but it’s just that I…I keep seeing him everywhere.”

  “I understand, baby. Your dad’s spirit is all over that—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “Not daddy…I keep seeing him everywhere.”

  “Oh,” he said after a moment.

  “No matter what I’m doing I always get the feeling he’s right there, watching me from around a corner or peeking through the blinds, or following me through the corn. I can’t seem to shake it. I mean…just now there was a deer walking through the corn and my first thought was him.”

  “Val…this is all still pretty raw. It’s just been a week, it’s going to take some time.”

  She made an ambiguous noise. Crow said, sounding startled, “Heck with the store. Let me tidy up a few things around here and then I’ll be over. Want me to pick up some Chinese?”

  “That sounds good.”

  “See you soon, my love.”

  “Crow…?”

  “Yeah, baby.”

  “I really do love you with all my heart.”

  “Me too, Val. See you soon.”

  She punched the OFF button and snugged the phone back down into her jeans, waved good-bye to Diego, and strolled back toward the house. As if in reflection of her mood, the sky was a weary gray with a sadness of clouds drooping low over the distant trees and a sigh of a cold breeze. A few birds flew overhead but they were hungry and lonely birds, flying fast to find other places where warmth and hope still prospered. Far above the clouds an invisible plane flew from some distant somewhere to another place, whisking by over the grayness of Pine Deep, the intermittent drone of its engine sounding like the moan of some sleeping person dreaming of pain.

  As she walked, she came to the spot where her father had died and stopped. There was no sign of it now except for tattered streamers of yellow police tape tied to the fence posts. She climbed onto the fence and sat there in the cold, her short hair snapping in the wind, her dark eyes filling with tears, her mouth tight with cold anger, trying to grasp the impossibility of it all. Her father had died there. Right there, on that tiny stretch of earth that looked no different than any other soil anywhere in the world, and yet it was there, right there, that he had bled to death alone in the rainy darkness on that terrible night last week. The thought that his blood was still trapped within the soil made her feel at once totally repulsed and yet at the same time oddly comforted. It was a stupid thought, she told herself, but somehow she felt as though it meant that something of her father’s spirit remained here, too, as if some trick of geomancy had allowed him to linger. With a certainty as if of ancient ritual Val knew that day after day, probably for the rest of her life, she would come out here and feel for her father’s spirit in the air and in the soil. The thought that such a spirit, such a person who had been filled with so much vitality, so much love and gentle strength could simply end was just too horrible, and it made her feel terribly mortal. If Henry Guthrie could be snuffed out with no more than the flex of a finger on a trigger, then her own life, Crow’s life, and the life of their baby were all equally transient.

  She thought also of another Guthrie who had died there, just a few feet from where Daddy had been killed. Young Roger Guthrie, on leave from the Air Force, Val’s handsome cousin who looked more like Henry than Mark did. Rog had been home just a week, but had picked a bad time for it. That was the year of the Black Harvest, three decades ago. A lot of folks had died that year, some from diseases born of the blight—but Rog had not caught any disease. He had been one of the victims of the Pine Deep Reaper. Right here, right at this spot. This place was awash in Guthrie blood, and the thought of it fueled Val’s rage.

  Val wiped her eyes, feeling the wind back and freshen. There was a hint of moisture in the air, and the tang of ozone; it smelled like snow but was too early in the year for that. A storm smell, she judged. Another storm. God. The last storm had come on like this, growing in the afternoon, building all through the evening and then exploding in the deep of night with a force that had shattered her life. If there could be a worse storm—or a storm whose power could do more damage—than the one that had blown Karl Ruger into Pine Deep, Val hoped that she would never live to see it. The very thought of it made her stomach take a sickening lurch.

  Or was that morning sickness? She tugged her right hand out of her pocket and placed her palm and spread fingers over her stomach. She was forty and had never been pregnant before. When Ruger had broken into the house he’d punched her in the stomach and Val had been terrified that her baby—her baby, she was not used to even thinking that word—had been harmed. But Weinstock had examined her. She hadn’t miscarried. Her baby was one thing about her life that Ruger hadn’t been able to lay his hard hands upon.

  Val stopped and turned, lookin
g up at the clouds. They were not yet so dense as to be featureless and while she stared at them, at the shapes and shadows formed by the slowly changing billows, she imagined that she saw a face up there. His face. Just for a moment—a pale face with flashing dark eyes and heavy features. It was there for just a moment, for a heartbeat, and then it was gone, blown by cold winds into some other disguise and then to nothing as the skies darkened. Shivering with the cold, Val turned and headed home while above and around her the storm drew back its fist.

  Chapter 18

  (1)

  When Newton parked in the turnaround, Crow was standing on the top step of the porch, a bottle of Yoo-Hoo in one hand, a Phillies ball cap pushed back on his head and a smile on his face. As Newton got out and approached, he saw that Val Guthrie was seated on a porch swing. He recognized her from the stock photos his paper had run after the shooting. Unlike Crow, she was not smiling, and her eyes were even colder and less welcoming than the cop’s had been.

  “Welcome aboard,” Crow said and took one step down as he extended his hand. “This is my fiancée, Val Guthrie.”

  He nodded to Val. “Good afternoon, Ms. Guthrie. Please accept my condolences. And…thanks for taking some time out to chat with me. I can’t even imagine how tough things must be for you both right now.” He offered his hand to her and her grip was stronger than his by a long way.

  “Glad to have you, Mr. Newton,” Val said. “I read your articles. I appreciate the things you said about my father.” Her eyes were a hard, dark blue and though there was obvious sadness in them, they were not weak eyes in any way. Her gaze was level, direct, and unwavering. “I’ve read other pieces about what happened, and some writers have used some pretty unfair descriptions, calling Dad ‘an old man’ and insinuating that he was too old to outrun the bullet that killed him. What do you think about that?”

  Newton felt his neck get hot. He was never good around women at the best of times, and Val Guthrie made him immeasurably uncomfortable. A dozen different replies flitted through his head, but he liked the strength he saw in her eyes, and all thoughts of dissembling—or of defending his fellow journalists—melted away. “Quite frankly, Ms. Guthrie, even if your father had been a twenty-year-old Olympic track star he couldn’t have outrun a bullet. No one can. That’s why cowards like Karl Ruger use guns.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Crow give him a tiny nod of approval. Newton plowed on. “Since the other day I’ve been asking around about your father and the picture I got was that, despite his age, he was one tough son of a bitch, if you don’t mind me being frank. So, if I interpret the facts right, I believe he died to save your life, which qualifies him in my book as a hero. I wish I’d had the chance to know him.”

  Val looked up at him for a moment. Her eyes didn’t soften, but she did give him a small smile. “Thank you, Mr. Newton.”

  “Please, just call me Newton…or Newt. Everyone does.”

  “Val,” she said, nodding. She was a very pretty woman, a few years older than Newton, and with the kind of intensity that had always frightened him. She wore a thin silver chain around her neck on which was a cross—surprisingly delicate for so strong a woman—that hung just above the vee of her blouse. He noticed that her only concession to apparent vulnerability was that she absently touched the cross from time to time, as if drawing comfort from it.

  To Crow, she said, “I like this one. He can stay.”

  “You want something to drink, Newt?” Crow asked. “Ice tea? Something?”

  “If you have another one of those,” he said gesturing with his chin toward Crow’s Yoo-Hoo, “then I’ll have one.”

  “Good man.” Crow went into the house and came back out with two cold bottles for them, and a cup of coffee for Val. To Newton he said, “Pull up a pew.” They sat down, shook their bottles, opened them, and exchanged a nod as they took their first sips. “Where do we start?” Crow asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Well,” Newton said, removing a small tape recorder from his briefcase, “first I want to know if it’s okay if I tape this.”

  Crow nodded. “Sure, but I do have a couple of conditions before we start. I’m willing to tell you the whole story of the Pine Deep Massacre, and everything I know about the Bone Man, but only on two conditions.”

  Newton hedged. “What conditions?”

  “First,” said Crow, “you don’t print any part of it I tell you not to print.”

  “I don’t know if I can agree to that.”

  Crow spread his hands. “Have a nice trip back. Watch out for potholes.”

  “No! No, I mean, how can I—”

  “Newt, listen to me, I’m going to give you a hell of a story. I’m not joking here, and it’s as intense a story as you’re ever likely to write. If I want something kept out of it, then you have to trust that I have a good reason, but you also have to trust that what I will let you write about will be well worth any small concessions. So…?”

  The reporter gave it some thought, but in the end his curiosity won out over any objections he might have otherwise raised. “Okay. I agree. What’s the second condition?”

  Crow smiled faintly. “That if you don’t believe me, at least do me the courtesy of not laughing in my face.”

  “Of course not—”

  “Good, ’cause some of what I have to tell you is going to be pretty hard to swallow. I haven’t told this story to too many people—actually I’ve only told it to Val, and she was there for most of it—and I don’t feel like being ridiculed for it.”

  From that Newton supposed that Crow had been too drunk to remember telling the story to Toby, but he decided not to mention it. “I can promise you that I won’t laugh or mock or anything. Just tell me, and I’ll listen.”

  “Okay,” Crow said, nodding. “I’m taking you on faith, Newt. Don’t make me sorry about that. You can turn your recorder on.” He paused and closed his eyes, collecting scraps of old memories from a closet deep within his mind. He began speaking before he opened his eyes. “If you can believe it, except for Val’s dad being killed, the stuff that happened here these last few days were nothing compared to what happened thirty years ago. I mean, Karl Ruger and his cronies were bad enough, but back then we had someone as close to the devil as anyone I ever hope to meet. And like I told you yesterday it wasn’t the Bone Man…he wasn’t the one the papers nicknamed ‘the Reaper.’ I’d bet my life on that right now, and I can say that because I did stake my life on it back then.”

  “Then, who…?”

  Crow glanced left and right as if looking to see who was listening and then leaned close and in a hushed voice said, “Ubel Griswold.”

  “I know that name…” Newton flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Griswold—yeah, he was the last of the victims, right? A local farmer?”

  Crow shook his head. “I figured you’d have that wrong. I mean, yeah, Griswold was a farmer, but he wasn’t one of the victims.” He glanced at Val. “You know, baby, I don’t think I’ve even said that name out loud in…what? Twenty years? Whew!” He turned back to Newton. “It’s not a name one says lightly, no sirree. At least not me. Folks around here openly blame the Bone Man for what happened, but it was Ubel Griswold. He was an evil, evil man.”

  “You’re confusing me here, Crow. Who was he?”

  “What was he is a better way to put it.” Crow considered. “First let me put things into perspective for you, so let’s jump back thirty-six years ago to when Griswold first moved to Pine Deep, supposedly from Germany, and bought an old stone farmhouse in one of the more remote sections of town, way off of A-32 and nearly impossible to reach except by some obscure back road that’s no longer even there. This was before A-32 was expanded and paved, you understand. Back then it was called the Pinelands Highway, which was a joke because it was just dirt and gravel. When they built A-32 twenty-six years ago, a lot of the smaller roads became officially abandoned since many of them were cut into the state forest. That’s why they built t
he road in the first place, to keep traffic out of the forest. Anyway, Griswold settled himself down to raise cattle and generally kept to himself. His farm was small but he had a fair-sized herd for the available room. There are, however, no records of him ever selling a single one. Odd, don’t you think?”

  Newton shrugged. Even after eight years in Black Marsh, what he knew about cattle farming would barely fill the back of an index card. Other than the fact that they were big, smelly, and went “Moo!” he didn’t know from cattle beyond medium rare at Outback Steakhouse. “Private sales?”

  Crow shook his head and continued, “Griswold ran his farm more or less by himself. Sometimes he’d turn a couple of acres over to crops like pumpkins and corn and gourds, and then he’d hire day labor, always hiring drifters as his day labor. Not regular migrant workers, mind you, but hoboes, bums, guys like that. Never any local people.”

  “So what? Cheap labor is cheap labor, and, who knows, maybe he felt sorry for them.”

  Val said dryly, “I don’t think that was it.”

  “No,” Crow agreed, “I think he just liked the fact that these were people no one would ever care about.”

  “How do you mean?”