Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  Boyd’s hand reached automatically for his phone. He’d turned it off right after he first got there, which Hallie was sure was something he never did.

  Lily, which Hallie now knew was the ghost’s name, though she tended to think of her as “Boyd’s dead wife,” drifted over. She’d followed them into the dead zone, paused at the edge, like she could tell the difference, then drifted back to the center of the intersection. Hallie’d thought maybe she’d disappear once the vehicles were moved, but ghosts never did the logical thing. And besides, her car was still here.

  With the red car by the side of the road and the grain truck on its way to Prairie City, the intersection looked huge, though it wasn’t. It was just an ordinary intersection—a couple of two-lane old asphalt roads come together in the flat, big-horizon middle of nowhere. There was a smell in the air of approaching rain and dry leaves. The wind ruffled grass against a single old fence post on the north side of the road. Hallie and Boyd stood across the road from the red car so that it was right there, like a red slash across the landscape.

  Boyd had turned his phone back on and was scrolling for messages when his radio crackled again.

  “Are you finished out there?” Patty asked.

  Boyd looked around as if he had no idea. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Pretty much.”

  “Tell her you’re taking the rest of the day off,” Hallie said.

  “What have you got?” Boyd asked, ignoring Hallie. His voice sounded almost normal.

  “Since you’re out that way,” Patty said, “you want to run by the old Packer place? Sigurdson claims someone’s running cattle out there. Says he’s got the only lease, from the bank, and there shouldn’t be anyone else on it. I’m sure he’s been out there with his hands a half dozen times before it occurred to him to call it in. In any case, I said we’d check on it.”

  “Sure,” Boyd said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You can’t just go back to work,” Hallie said.

  “What’s your better idea?” he said.

  “What’s my better idea? My better idea is to do something about this.” She flung her arm wide, to encompass the intersection and the dead circle and the whole damn prairie if it came to that.

  “I don’t want you to touch this.”

  “Seriously? You’re seriously telling me to stay out of this? No.”

  Something shifted in him as he looked at her, from angry to tired, like all this coming up from seven years ago and not making any sense had made him weary in his bones. “What, Hallie?” he asked. “What are you going to do? What do you know about it? About any of it?”

  “Boyd,” Hallie said, like saying his name would make this stop. “This is a problem. It’s in my backyard. Hollowell knew me. I don’t know what’s going on, but neither do you. I’m sure as hell going to do something.”

  “I thought you were leaving.”

  And there it was. That she was leaving. And he was not. “I’m not leaving today,” she said.

  “This is commitment, Hallie,” Boyd said. “You’re committing to something.”

  “This is solving a problem.”

  “There are always problems.”

  “Not like this one.”

  “Look,” he said. He looked at the cloud-covered sky, like looking at Hallie was just too hard. “I am going to finish my shift. Then I’m going to run these VIN numbers and track down where Travis Hollowell is buried. I’m going to return my phone calls and put together a list of what I know and what I need to do and who I should call, because that’s what I do. If you want me to call you after that, I can call.”

  Hallie’s right hand squeezed into a fist, which she shoved into her jacket pocket. “Yes, Boyd,” and was pleased that her voice was so calm and even. “I want you to call me after that.”

  “Fine.”

  He turned away and walked the ten feet back to his car, then paused with his hand on the car door. “Be careful, Hallie. I mean it. Whatever he is now, whatever he wants, he’s gone to a lot of trouble. This was a damned elaborate setup in order to give me a message.”

  Hallie looked over at the intersection where the two vehicles had sat, each tangled in the other before Tom had separated them; she looked at her pickup truck still sitting at the other side of the intersection. “He didn’t just give it to you,” she said. “He gave it to me too.”

  7

  “Damn it,” Hallie said to no one in particular as she watched Boyd drive away a few minutes later. She walked back to her truck.

  The black dog was already there when she opened the driver’s door, curled up on the seat as if it had never left. Lily’s ghost was there too, floating in the space between Hallie and the dog. It surprised her that the ghost was there. She’d thought, for some reason, that it would stick with Boyd.

  But no, it was clearly her ghost now. And that was all right. She was prepared—or as prepared as someone could be—for that. It meant that no matter what Boyd said or thought, this was her problem too.

  Like Pabby was her problem.

  “Ghosts,” the dog said when Hallie opened the door, hissing on the final s. Hallie couldn’t tell if it was annoyed or pleased.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You can always leave.”

  The dog put its paw forward on the seat. Lily’s ghost looked down as if, unlike every other ghost Hallie had seen, it was aware. Or maybe it was because it was a black dog, because weren’t they sort of on the same plane, ghosts and black dogs? Both of them dead or nearly dead or left over after death. The ghost touched the dog’s paw and the dog huffed out that sound that was almost a laugh.

  Jesus, thought Hallie, this is my life.

  She started up the truck and pulled back out onto the road. She caught up with Tom easily, waved out the window as she went by and watched him disappear in the rearview mirror. She thought about Travis Hollowell—wasn’t that what Boyd had said the disappearing man’s name was?—most of the half hour it took to get to West Prairie City. Three things stood out: He was dead, he had a history with Boyd, and whatever was going on, it wasn’t just about Boyd, no matter how much Boyd wanted it to be. Hollowell could have set that accident up so only Boyd would see it—however he’d set it up, which didn’t particularly worry Hallie, the how, though it probably should. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t popped in to talk to Boyd either. He’d talked to her.

  She glanced down at the dog on the seat. “What do you know about that back there?” Hallie asked it. If it was going to hang around, it might as well be useful.

  The dog cocked an ear at her. “Ask the ghost,” it said, hissing all the s’s.

  “Ghosts don’t talk,” Hallie said.

  “Too bad,” said the dog. Lily floated against the dash as if neither of them were anything to her.

  A few minutes later, Hallie pulled into the parking lot of the single grocery store in West PC. Lily disappeared when she parked. Just—poof—gone, warm air rushing in to replace the cold. The black dog rose and stretched, then jumped through the closed passenger-side window, disappearing just before it touched the ground. Hallie shook her head and exited the truck herself, the normal way, through the open door.

  Everything she picked up for the ranch, she picked up a duplicate for Pabby—milk, eggs, vegetables, and bread. She figured Pabby had beef in her big freezer, but she tossed a couple of pounds of bacon, some flour, and two sacks of sugar into the cart.

  The sun was setting by the time she got to Pabby’s and dropped off the supplies. Tiny bits of cloth tied to scattered clumps of prairie grass, to an old fencepost, to a tree branch fluttered in the raw evening breeze. They’d always been there, in the yard, along the corral. Hallie’d never paid attention, just something that made the place Pabby’s. But now she knew—the boundary of a hex ring.

  “Did you get anywhere yet?” Pabby asked when she opened the door to Hallie.

  Hallie stared at her. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Well, I haven’t got forever.”

  “
You owe me for the groceries,” Hallie told her. Pabby looked at her. “And I’ll get on it,” Hallie said. “I will.” She was pretty sure Pabby wouldn’t be impressed by Laddie Kennedy or the afternoon she’d spent by the side of the road.

  Pabby paid her with six five-dollar bills, fourteen ones, and seven dollars in dimes and quarters. She invited Hallie for dinner, but Hallie told her she had more groceries in the truck, which was true. Besides, she felt like she’d been sitting all day even though she hadn’t.

  Jake’s car still sat by the side of the road when Hallie finally drove back home. It was not quite dark, the sky fading out like an old fluorescent light. She slowed going by—an old car with the hood up. Maybe he was waiting on a part.

  If it was still there in the morning, she’d call him. Offer to get a tractor and chain, at least tow it up the drive until he could fix it.

  The house was empty. She put groceries away, then put on a warmer jacket and gloves and went down to check that the horses near the barns had enough hay and water.

  The black dog joined her—Hallie was getting used to it by now—and the horses, who’d been approaching the fence, wheeled as one and raced to the other end of the pasture, clods of dirt flung back as they passed.

  “It’s like you make friends wherever you go,” Hallie said to the dog.

  “Like you,” the dog said.

  Hallie blinked.

  Sometimes at night since she’d been back from the army, Hallie wandered the house looking for things to do. She’d never been much for sitting; her interests in high school had been horses and cars. She was on the softball team in eighth grade, but it had been too hard to get to practice and especially to the games. She’d been a good hitter, a mediocre fielder, and a lousy team player.

  Once they were old enough, she’d had Dell to drag her places, Dell to make her do things like—once Dell had her license and, okay, maybe a year or two before, they’d ride into town in the summers to the Silver Dove for ice cream. There were always kids who knew Dell, who wanted to do something. There’d be a drag race or a bunch of kids down by the tracks or some place to hang out. Hallie didn’t go with her all the time, but Dell was how she learned where to go, how to find people. Dell would toss books at her and say, Hey, read this. Dell would sign them up for 4-H projects, for the county fair, for a Christmas pageant at a church they never went to the rest of the year.

  But all of that was gone now—no Dell, no 4-H, no hanging on corners on hot summer nights. Everything was blown to hell and gone, and Hallie hadn’t figured out yet what to do about it or how to stop missing Dell.

  She walked down to the horse barn, turned on the strung lights, and rooted out all the tack that needed cleaning. She’d been there maybe an hour, had shed her jacket and was wearing a Carhartt vest and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, when she heard a car heading up the drive.

  She didn’t bother to look out. If it was someone she didn’t know, the dog would bark. If it was someone she knew—and, frankly, she was pretty sure it would be Boyd—they’d find her.

  “Hallie.”

  There was something about the way he said her name, about the way he entered a space, whether she was looking at him or not, like the air changed, like he figured she would always know that it was him. And maybe she would. Like a dance without music. Like they almost knew each other.

  She laid aside the cloth and saddle soap and turned, setting her hip against the old tack box she’d been using as a workbench. She waited for Boyd to speak. He was still pissed, she could tell, but he’d bitten it back down, fit it back into the way he liked to keep himself, though it came through in the tension across his shoulders and the hard light in his eyes. She didn’t think he was pissed at her, except in a general way that he wouldn’t admit to. It didn’t matter if he was. Hallie could handle that. What mattered was that he was here.

  As she waited for him to speak, Lily’s ghost drifted through the side wall of the barn and floated a few inches away from Hallie’s left elbow. It was like sitting too close to an old window in February. The cold made Hallie roll the cuffs of her flannel shirt back down and button the buttons. The black dog, which had been sitting on the tack box watching her, jumped down, sniffed at Boyd as it walked past, and settled in the shadows underneath the old hayloft.

  Boyd stuck a hand in the pocket of his jeans and leaned against a pole a few feet from Hallie. He rubbed his other hand across the bridge of his nose. The imperfect light cast a shadow across the right side of his face and made it look more angular than usual, which, in turn, made him look older.

  “I have to go out of town for a couple of days,” he said.

  “Like, leaving?” Hallie said, which was, probably, exactly the wrong thing to say.

  Boyd’s eyes narrowed, but all he said was, “For a couple of days.”

  He paused, like he was figuring out what to say next, a problem they both had, not just because they didn’t know who or what they were to each other, but because the subject of their conversations kept being things neither of them had ever heard of or knew anything about.

  Hallie drew in her breath and held it. Stop it, she told herself. Just … stop.

  “Can I help?” she asked instead.

  When he spoke, it was almost like he’d changed the subject. “There are things that you should know,” he said. “Things that might help. I mean, I don’t know that they’ll help, but I don’t want something to happen while I’m gone because you didn’t know something you needed to know.”

  Hallie raised an eyebrow, though Boyd probably couldn’t see it in the indifferent light. “Okay,” she said.

  He continued. “Travis Hollowell. He was … not anyone special. I spent some time researching him after,” a trace of bitterness in his voice, like he wished he’d done something sooner or smarter or different. “He was a systems analyst for some company in Cedar Rapids. He drove a five-year-old Toyota. He was thirty-nine years old. He didn’t have a criminal record. He had an ex-girlfriend who said nice things about him. He and Lily’s stepfather both grew up in Steamboat Rock, that was how they knew each other. He had liver cancer. He wouldn’t have lived another year.”

  “He was dying?”

  Boyd nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Wait. He was dying and he was spending his time stalking your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Things like that, they don’t always,” Boyd said.

  “No, I know,” Hallie said. “But he came back from the dead.” Which, even with everything she’d seen, felt so odd to say, like it changed the world just by saying it, like she’d accepted her own death and Martin and black dogs, but this was a whole new scale. She’d been dead seven minutes after all, not seven years.

  “Maybe it wasn’t him,” Boyd said.

  “Even if we pretend for a minute that it wasn’t him, that someone for some inexplicable reason was impersonating him, how do you explain the wreckage? Even Martin couldn’t have done that, and Martin had a lot of power. It’s him. You and I both know it’s him. We just haven’t figured out how.”

  “There’s something else,” Boyd said.

  Hallie’d assumed there was. She was pretty sure he wasn’t leaving town because Travis Hollowell had been dying before he died. “Lily’s sister called,” he said. “That’s who was trying to reach me when we were out on—when we were at the accident.” He paused, shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “She was pretty upset. She was crying. She’s just eighteen. She’s working her way through college. Her mother died a couple of years ago, and her stepfather…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. She calls me sometimes because I’m sort of the only family she has.”

  Wind swept in around the corner of the open barn door and stirred the loose straw under the hayloft. It was a cold wind, as cold as it had been so far all fall, promising that a killing frost would come soon, maybe even tonight.

  “Today she called to tell me th
at on her way to class she came across an accident in the middle of an intersection.” He looked straight at Hallie. “An accident involving a red car and a grain truck. An accident with no drivers, no skid marks. An accident just like the one that killed her sister.”

  “Jesus,” Hallie said. “Are you kidding me?”

  Boyd shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It can’t be a joke.” Like he wished it were a joke, cruel and possibly evil, but at least if it was a joke, they could figure out what to do.

  “I told her I would come,” Boyd said.

  “Yeah, but, Boyd—”

  “I have to go,” he said, his voice quiet and firm.

  “No, I understand that,” Hallie said. “But what if it’s a trap?”

  “What?”

  “A trap. Like he wants to lure you to Iowa.”

  He frowned. “Why would that be a trap and not the one here this morning?”

  “He wants something, Boyd. This kind of thing doesn’t happen for no reason.”

  “I know. But I have to go.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. Because he did. Of course. Because someone needed him. “I should come with you.”

  “No.” His response was unequivocal.

  Hallie’s hackles rose.

  “The next time you leave South Dakota,” Boyd said, “something is going to happen.”

  Hallie just looked at him. Really?

  He stumbled over his words. “I mean … I don’t mean you should never leave. I’m not trying to tell you what you should do or not do. Or, I guess I am. Huh.” He took a breath and started over. “I don’t mean you shouldn’t ever leave South Dakota. Because I would never tell you that. Even if I wanted to tell you that. Which I—I don’t know, Hallie, why is this so complicated?”

  And suddenly they weren’t talking about ghosts or disappearing men or Boyd’s dreams anymore. “It’s not complicated,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  “It is for me,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “Everything’s complicated for you.”