Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  He almost laughed, like the sound the black dog made when it talked to Hallie.

  8

  Some of Boyd’s anger had dissipated since he walked into the barn, but there was still a tension in him, in the way he moved. And who could blame him? Even if it had been partly about rescuing her, he must have loved Lily. He’d married her. And she’d died. Died saving him in some way Hallie wasn’t completely clear on—in some way Boyd wasn’t even completely clear on. Hallie would be down at the courthouse breaking windows if it had happened to her.

  “Come over here,” she said.

  He closed the distance between them.

  “Look over there.” She pointed in the direction of the black dog. Boyd turned and leaned against the tack box, bracing himself with an arm behind her back. His face was right next to hers; she could feel the warmth of his skin almost, but not quite, touching her own.

  The spot she pointed at was just to the right of the open door where the black dog was lying. “What do you see?” she asked. She pretty much expected that he wouldn’t see it, but she had to ask.

  “There?” Boyd pointed too.

  Hallie moved his hand an inch to the right. “There,” she said.

  “Loose straw? A crack in that windowpane?”

  “You can see a crack in the windowpane from here?” Hallie asked, because it was thirty feet away and in shadow.

  Boyd turned and put his hand on her knee. His eyes were dark in the dimly lit barn. “What do you see?” he asked.

  “A black dog,” Hallie said.

  “What?” He was looking at her profile, not at the spot where the dog was, like he could see what she was seeing by looking at her face.

  “It says it’s a harbinger.”

  “Of death?”

  “Well, I guess,” Hallie said.

  His hand tightened on her knee. His face was less than three inches from hers.

  “Not of my death,” she said. “Or yours either,” she added after a moment in case that wasn’t clear. “And I don’t think it has anything to do with the thing out on old CR7. The accident.”

  “You don’t?” He sounded skeptical, and who could blame him? Today had been death all around.

  “Pretty sure,” she said. She didn’t offer him the details of her morning visit to Pabby’s. He had enough on his mind already. It would keep for now, what with Pabby safe behind the hex ring.

  “What does it want, then?” Boyd asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  Boyd looked where Hallie had pointed again, but the dog was up now and moving toward them. It leaped onto the tack box and settled beside her on the side opposite Boyd.

  “Interesting,” it said, its voice like the sighing of the wind.

  “Is it a problem?” Boyd asked.

  “Yeah, I’m still trying to figure that out,” Hallie said. “Do you know anything about black dogs? Had any dreams about them?” She turned toward him on the tack box, raised a knee, and rested her chin on it.

  It was a long moment before he answered, and Hallie had almost decided that maybe he had been dreaming about black dogs. He put a hand on her other knee and she didn’t move, like moving would make this moment disappear forever. “I dream about you.”

  She couldn’t help it: she laughed. “Is that like a line? Are you giving me a line?” She looked at him and he was smiling, but he shook his head.

  “I dreamt about you and a dog, and you were alone on the big open prairie. There was a shallow ditch. It didn’t look any different on one side or the other, but I knew, in the dream, that if you crossed that ditch, everything changed.”

  “So you’re saying don’t leave?”

  He drew back a little. “I told you,” he said. “I will never say that.”

  She wanted to call him a bastard for that, but it probably wasn’t a trick. He probably meant it.

  He moved his hand up her leg just along the inside of her thigh. “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever known,” he said.

  Was that a line too? But she didn’t ask. She knew that it wasn’t.

  And it wasn’t like Hallie hadn’t kissed boys, because she had. More than one. But this mattered and she knew it mattered. Even if she took Kate Matousek’s job, this, right here, would matter.

  She slid off the tack box. He put a hand around her waist and drew her close. When he kissed her, his lips tasted like summer, like the kind of summer she hadn’t seen in years. She put her hand on the back of his neck, felt the rough bristles of his short hair, like a soldier’s. His hand slid down the vee of her shirt and paused at the first button. He unbuttoned it without fumbling, like he’d done it a hundred times before. Slid down to the next one and it felt right, felt like coming home in a way that actually coming home had never felt.

  She dropped her hands to his waist and pulled the tail of his shirt out of his jeans. Slid her hand along his waist and when she touched his spine he shivered, but his skin felt so warm to her, like he held all the warmth in the universe, like he always had. She kept her hand there, in the hollow of his back, and pulled him close.

  He’d unbuttoned her shirt to the waist, but then he stopped, stymied by the thermal shirt she was wearing and the top button on her jeans. She pushed him away, pulled both shirts out of the waistband and finished unbuttoning the flannel one. She reached for his belt, looked at him, like a question. He responded with a smile.

  Warmth rushed through her, anticipation and also nerves because she wanted this, wanted him, wanted everything about this moment, but it was the wanting that scared her. Because these were the moments that held a person in place, held them until twenty years had passed and nothing had happened. Except this. Then, he kissed her again and his hand slid along her hip and she didn’t think about any of that, of before or after, just fumbled with his belt buckle, which seemed to be much more complicated than it looked.

  And oh hell, what did it matter, she would get it later. She put her arms around his neck and he lifted her onto the tack box like she weighed nothing.

  She wished that time would stop, that they would stay here forever, that the world outside would leave them—

  She felt cold like ice against her spine.

  Not a ghost. Not now. She wanted to lose herself. And why not? Didn’t she, didn’t they, deserve even one brief moment outside the world?

  The cold intensified, all along her left side, walk-in-freezer cold. Hallie realized whose ghost it was.

  Crap.

  Crap crap crap crap. She jumped off the tack box and was halfway across the barn and buttoning her shirt while Boyd stood and looked at her, like she’d gone nuts.

  “Jesus,” she said. How was this fair?

  “What?” Boyd sounded irritated, and who could blame him?

  “Your wife. Jesus Christ, it’s—it’s your wife.” Hallie hadn’t actually imagined ever saying a line like that, but if she had imagined it, she would have expected a flesh-and-blood wife. Not this. And it wasn’t fair, of her to say it or of it to be that way, not fair to Lily or Boyd or Hallie, not to any of them. But it was that way all the same.

  “My wife?”

  Hallie crossed the barn again, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, pulled him close to her, and kissed him hard, because it wasn’t going to end with her halfway across the floor. It wasn’t, sadly, going to end with anything else either.

  “I’ve done a lot of things,” she said, still holding his shirtfront in a tight fist. “Some of them were … crazy.” Because when she was in Germany she’d done it at three thirty in the morning in a public fountain. “And I’ve never been shy. But I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I know you can’t see her. I know it’s been seven years and she’s gone. I know all that. But—no.”

  Boyd brushed a stray hair off her face and Hallie could see that he wanted to be amused, because, frankly, it was amusing, or would be in some future they had yet to reach, but he couldn’t do it. Because Lily wasn’t just a ghost to him.

  She stared at her h
and gripping his shirt, wanted to grip it tighter, wanted to hold on forever and never let go. Boyd covered her hand with his and squeezed. “I wrinkled your shirt,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told her.

  But it did. That was the problem. All of it mattered. She just hadn’t yet figured out how it mattered or what it meant.

  After a long minute or two, she stepped away, unwound her hand, and tried to smooth out the creases in the front of his once-crisp shirt. She cleared her throat. “How long will you be gone?”

  “Three days, I guess. I’ll be back by Thursday at the latest.” He kissed her, like a promise, which made her feel as if she were all edges and angles. She didn’t want promises; she wanted him.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “Good plan,” Hallie told him.

  She stood in the open barn door and watched Boyd walk back to his Jeep Cherokee. He’d driven down the lane almost to the horse barn before he parked and she wondered how he’d known she was there. The big equipment shed didn’t exist anymore except as a new concrete slab and stacks of timber, and she couldn’t see any lights in the house, though her father must be home because she could see his truck on the edge of the circle cast by the yard light.

  She waited until the taillights of Boyd’s Jeep disappeared into the shallow dip halfway down the long drive, then stood another few minutes with her head against the rough wood of the door framing. She hadn’t told him about Kate Matousek’s job offer.

  Crap.

  Because she’d meant to tell him. She might feel a powerful need to move and keep moving, but she never meant to lie to him or to pretend it wasn’t his business or that he wouldn’t care. She thought about calling him, but thought that would look like she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him to his face. But Hallie would tell anyone anything face-to-face. She liked it that way. Everything in the open.

  She went back into the barn, put away the tack she’d been cleaning, and turned out the lights. Outside, she slid the door along its track with a deep satisfying rumble. Just before it slid completely closed it jumped the track, as it was prone to do, and Hallie grabbed the handle and the rough edge of the door and gave the whole thing a hard heave upward to jump it back on. It probably needed a new track and she figured she’d look at it tomorrow. Or, as she ticked off all the things already on her list—Pabby and Boyd and the shadow she’d seen so long ago, it almost felt like a lifetime—the day after.

  As she walked up the lane to the house, her cell phone rang. Thinking it was Boyd, she answered, saying, “Look, I should tell you—”

  At the same time, Laddie Kennedy said, “It’s Laddie.”

  And because Hallie was thinking about Boyd and Lily and Travis Hollowell rather than Pabby and hex rings and black dogs, she said without preamble, “What kind of person comes back from the dead?”

  There was a brief pause. “Is that a new question?” Laddie asked.

  Hallie guessed it was. “Yes,” she said.

  “You know, I gotta make a living,” Laddie told her.

  “Yeah. Okay.” Because he did. Everyone did. “Another twenty dollars, then?” Hallie asked. This was going to get expensive. And it wasn’t like Pabby was paying her. Or Lily. Or even Boyd. Not that she would ask him. Or any one of them. But Hallie didn’t have much money either, hadn’t talked to her dad about money for working the ranch. That was just something she did. Because she was here. And his daughter. She had some savings from the army, but that was it.

  “If money’s an issue,” Laddie said quick, like he’d already been thinking about it, “we could trade. I got a few head of cattle. I need a place to run them. It’s not much,” he added. “Someday I’ll have my own place again. But, well … not yet.”

  “I can ask,” Hallie said. She’d almost said, sure, fine; then she’d remembered—this wasn’t her ranch, her grazing, her resources.

  Laddie was quiet. “Vance don’t like me much,” he said.

  Hallie didn’t remember her father ever mentioning Laddie or any of the Kennedys, except once, when their ranch had gone to the bank. “It won’t be a problem,” Hallie said. If her father didn’t like it, she’d ask Brett. Brett and her father weren’t running cattle anymore, a lot of acres over there that weren’t being grazed at all.

  “Thanks,” Laddie said, his voice flat as if he didn’t want to be grateful for something he wouldn’t have to do if the fates had been kinder, if he hadn’t lost his land, and Hallie knew how that felt. It was the way the world worked. “I’ll give you a question for every week they graze,” he said.

  They haggled a bit about winter feed, then got back to the business at hand.

  “I’ve never heard of the dead coming back,” Laddie said. “Except ghosts, which are different. But I can ask.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “Ask. Thanks. Did you find anything out about the dogs?”

  “I … had a conversation,” Laddie began. “Don’t know how useful it’ll be.” He drew in a breath and let it out, like a sigh. “The dead, you know, they’re, well, they’re dead.”

  “Okay,” Hallie said. Because—really?

  “They don’t think like we do,” he said.

  “Where are they?”

  “What?”

  “The dead. Where do they—I don’t know—hang out? Are they in heaven? Hell?”

  “I don’t actually know,” Laddie said, like it was a revelation. “They’re just … someplace else.”

  “How do you know they’re dead?” She was standing in the shadow of the yard light. A breeze so soft, she felt it only against the exposed back of her neck and the tip of her nose, drifted up the drive from the east.

  “They tell me.” He sounded surprised like, what else would they be?

  “Okay, fine.” Because clearly he believed it. “But the black dogs, did they tell you how to get rid of them?”

  “You don’t.”

  “You don’t?” What kind of an answer was that?

  “They’re not alive. They can’t be killed.”

  “They exist, don’t they? If they exist, then they can … not exist.” She just needed to know how.

  “Look,” Laddie said, “it’s not the dogs you need to worry about. They don’t hurt anything. It’s the reapers.”

  “Don’t the dogs bring the reapers?” It seemed simple to Hallie. No dogs. No reapers. No dead Pabby.

  Hallie walked out onto the concrete slab, which would eventually be the new equipment shed. She stepped over some framing two-by-fours and paced across the open expanse. Her boots made a hollow sound on the smooth hard surface. The breeze had grown colder, a clear hint of frost in the air. She turned up the collar on her jacket.

  “The dogs are just to find you,” Laddie said. “Reapers don’t always need them.”

  “Wouldn’t they always know?” Wasn’t that their job?

  “When there’s a lot of death, they know,” Laddie said. “Like a battlefield or an earthquake or something. But one person? I guess they send out scouts.”

  “How do you know this?” Hallie asked.

  “People know how they die,” Laddie said.

  Hallie didn’t and she wondered briefly if that was the difference. If remembering how she died would be the last thing that happened before she really was dead.

  “How do I stop a reaper, then? What if there’s a mistake?”

  “You can’t stop a reaper,” Laddie said, his voice ticking up a notch like the conversation had suddenly tipped over into real from theory. “If a reaper touches you, you’re dead.”

  “Just … touches you?”

  “That’s their job.”

  “If it’s your time to die,” Hallie said.

  “If you get in their way,” Laddie said.

  “Seriously?”

  “This is death we’re talking about,” he said. “And I’ll tell you this for free.” His voice got flat and serious. “Death always wins.”

  9

  Hallie woke the next morning
, watered and fed and checked on cattle and horses and bison, ate breakfast and showered. She’d thought about what Laddie told her for a good long while the night before. He had to be wrong. There had to be a way to save Pabby. Death didn’t always win. Wasn’t she proof?

  She found her father pacing off measurements on the equipment shed slab and marking numbers directly on the concrete with a pencil.

  “Won’t that come off when it snows?” she asked.

  “I’ll measure it a couple more times,” he said. “To make sure.”

  She asked him about Laddie Kennedy running his cattle in with theirs.

  He looked at her. “He’s unlucky,” he finally said.

  “Because he lost his ranch? It happens.” Their ranch had almost gone under after Hallie’s mother died. Cattle prices had been way down and her father hadn’t really cared. He’d had to sell six hundred acres to Tel Sigurdson and work two winters in Rapid City for an appraiser to get enough actual cash to put things back in some kind of order.

  Her father ticked items off on his fingers. “He lost his ranch. His wife left him a year later for some fella over in St. Paul. His truck burned up right in front of the West PC fire station last January. They won’t even let him into the Viking over to Box Elder anymore because he breaks a chair every time he sits down. And he’s not a big guy, you’ve seen him.” He took his tape measure, snapped it out, looked at the notebook in his hand, checked the tape measure again, and wrote three numbers and a couple of words Hallie couldn’t read on the pristine concrete. Then, he said, “But, hell, yeah, let him run his cattle.” He squinted at her. “You’re not thinking he can actually tell the future, are you?”

  “No,” Hallie said. She’d tried to explain to her father what happened in September, tried to explain Martin Weber and ghosts and Boyd’s dreams and how all that had worked together. He’d sat and listened, even asked her a couple of questions. Then he said, “So he thought he could control the weather?”

  “He could control the weather,” Hallie said.

  “That’s pretty strange, thinking he could do something like that,” her father said.