by Catie Rhodes
“Reginald Mace was an architect. The man loved secret drawers, hidey-holes, all that stuff. Now what you got there is a set of plans for some kind of chest with a secret compartment in it. Paul, Jesse, and I figured it was the same secret drawers from the drawing in the family Bible.”
“How did the Holzes end up having the chest that had these papers in it?”
“Hell if I know. The Mace House’s furnishings got sold at county auction to pay back taxes in the year 1906. I suggested Rae see if she could find the county records. Figure out what was sold and who might have it.”
“Which she must have done,” I said, thinking of the list of items I found in the barn. “She had a writing slope, a chest, and a desk highlighted. Think it was any of those?”
“Probably.” Eddie smiled, a little proudly I thought. “Now, I’m gonna tell you what I told her. Leave it be. Nobody will ever find anything but bad luck and sorrow wrapped up with that treasure.”
“I don’t want the treasure. I want to find out who killed Rae and why. The sheriff’s department is looking for Chase.” I didn’t mention Rae’s ghost haunting me. It exhausted me just to think about that part.
“Don’t matter. Once you get to messing around with that treasure, it’s like something knows.”
“So you think the curse is real?”
Eddie didn’t speak, but, instead, handed me a lone sheet of paper. It was a copy of a newspaper article from the late 1800s. The headline read:
Eccentric Philanthropist Saves Child
I scanned the article. It documented Reginald Mace saving a deaf boy from being run down by a horse-drawn carriage. I looked up at Eddie and shook my head.
“When I was serious about finding the treasure, I got ahold of some diaries talking about that incident. People stood all around watching the carriage bearing down on the boy. They was gonna let it kill him. Reginald was the only one who acted.”
“Why wouldn’t anybody help him?”
“Nobody wanted to help the boy because his mother, Priscilla Herrera, was thought to be a witch. Some accounts say she might’a been an Indian, some say a Cajun. All accounts agree she was a real old woman who married a real young Spaniard. A year after her marriage, she bore him a son. People thought she’d used witchcraft to attract the Spaniard and to bear a child at her age.” Eddie belched. He didn’t have to say excuse me. We were family.
“What does this have to do with the treasure?”
“Priscilla and Reginald struck up a friendship. One of them old diaries I read belonged to a judge from the time. He threatened to arrest Priscilla for witchcraft, and Reginald paid him to lay off. He speculated Reginald wanted Priscilla to use witchcraft to bring William back, and when she couldn’t, Reginald got her to curse the treasure so nobody could have it.”
Neither Eddie nor I spoke for several minutes. I didn’t understand how this connected with Rae’s murder. Eddie’s words about Rae knowing too much echoed in my mind.
“Now you listen real careful, Peri Jean Mace.” Eddie leaned close to me, so close his sour, beer breath almost choked me. “Somebody murdered your cousin, and he’s still walking among us. If it was over this treasure, it ain’t no wonder she come to a bad end with the curse and all. But it might not have been the treasure. You go to poking around”—he squeezed my arm for emphasis—“no telling what kind of wasp’s nest you’ll stir up.”
I thought about Rae lying dead on the travel trailer’s fold-out table. She’d sure poked the wrong wasp’s nest.
I came home to a dark and empty house. A note from Memaw lay on the kitchen table.
“Baby, I went to visit Phyllis McNichols. Just needed to get out of the house.”
Memaw’s going anywhere after the trauma of Rae’s memorial service surprised me. I figured she’d hole up in her room and spend the evening alone. That’s what I intended to do.
My cellphone had locked up again, so I plugged it into the wall charger to restart it. What I saw shocked me. Ten missed calls? Three voicemails? What the hell?
All the calls and the voice mails were from Chase Fischer. I let out a frustrated yell. The one person I needed to talk to, and my phone acted up.
The first call came in about the time I pondered whether Ugly could lick his balls. The last call had been less than fifteen minutes ago. I bared my teeth at the phone. Useless thing. Soon as I could afford a new one, I’d trash it.
I accessed my voicemail. Chase’s first message played.
“Hey, girl. Chase here. Listen, I got me an idea for finding this Low_Ryder guy. I need your help. Call me when you get this.”
I paced the floor as the robotic female voice told me a bunch of useless stuff. My heart thundered so loud I barely heard it. Just as the tension reached an unbearable level, the second message played. Music blared over the tinny speaker. I held the phone away from my ear. Clinking and rattling noises garbled most of Chase’s message. All I understood was, “Peri . . . shit. Guess you’re busy . . . if you get this, meet me at . . . ”
The robotic female talked again as my mind raced merrily along, showing me horrible things. Finally, the third message played. The music was gone. Chase was somewhere outside, judging by wind whistling over the speaker.
“Chase again. I can’t believe I keep missing you. Remember when we used to go out to the old sawmill ruins? I need you to come out here.”
Chase paused, and another voice spoke in the background. Chase said, “Hey. What you doing out here?”
The message ended.
My crappy cellphone chugged through the process of dialing Chase. The call went straight to voicemail. My scalp tickled as sweat broke out on it. The smell of my own nervousness filled my senses. Something wasn’t right. I needed to find Chase. Right then.
On the way out the door, I remembered the sketchbook. If I saw Chase, he could look at the sketch and confirm he saw that man with Rae. I ran back to my room and grabbed it.
The sun sat low in the sky when I sped down the driveway. The Nova ate up the three miles to Beulah Church Road. From there, I turned onto a red dirt road, marked only by a “No Trespassing” sign nailed to a pine tree. Nobody ever paid attention to that sign. The sawmill ruins had long been a place where kids went to party and do other stuff.
I turned onto the narrow road and slowed to a crawl. Branches scraped at my paint job, making a toe-curling squeal. My car hopscotched over deep potholes. If I bottomed out on a tall rock, Eddie would kill me. The red dirt road dead-ended after a quarter mile. I walked the rest of the way on a footpath through the woods.
By the light of my huge metal flashlight, I cut through the well-worn trail leading into the rapidly darkening woods. The ruins sat only a few hundred yards into the pines. Underneath the canopy of trees, darkness had already fallen. The astringent perfume of pine blended with the odor of rotting leaves. Shapes and shadows mingled in shades of silvery gray.
The deserted sawmill town appeared amidst the thick forest as though beamed there. At first, a few flashes of white, concrete buildings peeked out between trees. Then, without warning, the town rose in all its weird glory like a monster rising out of a still lake. Even though I knew what to expect, I stopped for a moment to stare in wonder.
The sawmill ruins consisted of three concrete shells that had once been buildings. Kids partied in the old shell that only had three sides and no roof. The other two shells had four sides and roofs.
I couldn’t imagine why Chase would enter the darkness of the four-sided shells, so I went directly to the three-sided one. Light from the dying sunset filtered in and cast the whole place in a glowing orange. Empty.
“Chase?” My voice startled some roosting birds, which cried out and flew off, their batting wings the only noise in the darkening forest. The quiet closed in on me. Fear of the woods, the dark, and what else might be out here caused me to stumble as I walked around the site calling Chase’s name.
Calls to Chase’s cellphone went unanswered. Panic tightened my throat.
Chase wouldn’t just flake out of meeting me. He tended not to take life seriously enough, but this was different.
As I walked around, my pace got faster and faster until I jogged, my blood pounding in my head. The palm of my right hand ached, my fingertips numb. I opened my hand and saw I’d gripped my keys so tightly they indented my skin. I slipped my keys into my pocket and took deep breaths to calm down.
There was no use in this. I would go back to Memaw’s house and wait for Chase’s call. As I walked back to my car, I tripped on a branch and crashed to my knees. My hands took the impact of my fall and made a squishing noise on the leaf-covered ground. Realizing I’d landed in something wet, I jerked backward. Too late, I turned on my flashlight.
Red smudged the palms of my hands. Blood. Fear brightened and narrowed my vision. A flash of light flared behind my eyes, and a blast shook me and made my ears ring. I whipped my head around, but saw nothing and no one. Far as I tell, I was alone. I struggled to my feet and stood on my shaking legs, breathing hard. Maybe I was going crazy.
“Chase?” My voice echoed back, and I realized it was stupid to keep calling him. If the blood belonged to him, he probably couldn’t answer. Around the corner of the building farthest from my car, I spotted a shape lying on the ground.
“No,” I moaned. The flashlight spotlighted a hump of brown-gray fur. As I drew closer, the oblong head came into view. A dead deer. Some shithead had killed the deer, cut off the tender back strap meat, and just left the carcass to rot. Anger boiled inside me. It must have been where the blood came from. The vision of the deer’s last moments would haunt me for a while. Sometimes animals left behind a powerful presence.
I turned one last slow circle and admitted to myself that Chase was gone. He’d left with whomever—probably somebody like Tubby Tubman—he’d run into out here. I trudged back toward my old Nova, mentally shaking my head at Chase. Facing murder charges, he’d gone off to party.
Something crunched underfoot, and I shined the flashlight onto the leaves, expecting another grisly surprise. Gold flashed in the flashlight’s beam. I picked the object from the leaves. A matchbook.
The purple matchbook bore the words “Long Time Gone” in gold foil. A honky-tonk situated on the western edge of Burns County, Long Time Gone had a reputation as a rough place. Rumors claimed an outlaw biker gang ran contraband through it.
The second message from Chase had music playing in the background. I got out my phone. After a short struggle with the failing piece of technology, I replayed Chase’s message.
I heard music, all right. Behind it, I identified the clack of pool balls and the tinkle of glass. Perhaps Chase and whomever he left with had gone back to Long Time Gone. He probably couldn’t hear his cellphone because he was playing pool and getting a little drunk. I’d go find him and give him hell.
Long Time Gone wasn’t a regular hangout for me, but there was a first time for everything. Using the remainder of a bottled water and some tissues, I cleaned the blood off my hands. Disgusting. My rearview mirror showed my hair sticking up. I found a trial size container of gel, squeezed a little in the palm of my hand and scrunched my short hair. If my luck was in, the mess looked stylish. I studied my outfit and grimaced. I wore a faded t-shirt with a frayed collar. My blue jeans had a rip in the knee, and my beat up cowboy boots dated back to the seventies.
Oh, well. The fashion police didn’t patrol Long Time Gone. The arduous process of getting turned around and driving out of the woods earned the Nova a few deep gouges in its paint. Glad to get out of that creepy place, I almost didn’t care. Almost.
14
Long Time Gone was housed in a long, low, plywood building with a wooden deck hanging off one side. It sat on a small lot cut out of the dense, longleaf pine forest covering western Burns County.
On a Saturday night, vehicles of every kind jammed the parking lot. A long line of classic muscle cars took up the parking lot’s outer edge. There must have been truth to the rumors about drag racing out here.
Bikers hung out on the deck, yelling at each other, maybe due to the lasting effects of their loud pipes. They all stopped what they were doing to watch me, the newcomer, park my Nova and walk across the parking lot. When I got close, a guy wearing leather from head to toe hollered he’d buy me a drink. I pretended not to hear, and his friends jeered at him.
The heavy wooden door put up a struggle, much to the bikers’ amusement. Their catcalls provided the incentive for me to muscle my way inside. The interior of Long Time Gone hid under a haze of cigarette smoke. Politically correct no-smoking laws hadn’t reached this deep into the piney woods of East Texas—thank the powers that be. I dug for my cigarettes and lit up one of the little demons. A live band played classic rock rather poorly somewhere in the smoke. Raucous shouts and thundering games of pool punctuated the music, almost keeping a beat.
“It’s a five-dollar cover charge for the band.” The doorman emerged from the smoke and towered over me. Tall, muscular, and intimidating, this man looked like forty miles of rough asphalt.
Between the bushy black beard obscuring his lower face and the wild tangle of his shoulder-length black hair, he fit every stereotype appropriate to the situation. I dug a crumpled five-dollar bill out of my pocket and shoved it at him.
“Lemme stamp your hand.” He snatched my wrist and pressed a rubber stamp to the back of my hand. Tattoos covered his arm so completely the skin art merged into one big tattoo. It showed a naked tree, a wise owl, and the silhouettes of ravens.
I stared. I had tattoos, including a raven of my own, but nothing like this. Something so huge impressed me but also made me curious. Each of my tattoos meant something. I wondered what such an elaborate tattoo meant to this hulk of a man. The symbolism intrigued me. Under different circumstances, I might have offered to buy him a drink and let him tell me the story of it.
“Took me a year to get the sleeve. Big Billy Bob’s Ink in Arlington did ‘em.” He flashed a surprisingly even and white grin. “Didn’t hurt a bit.”
“I bet that’s a lie, but it’s good work.” We shared a laugh. He appealed to me for all the usual reasons. For once, I didn’t feel like acting on it.
“You have a good time, baby doll.” He winked and dismissed me.
I skirted the perimeter of Long Time Gone. Chase was nowhere to be found in the throng of merrymakers. The doorman might have been able to tell me if Chase was there, but he’d already returned to a game of darts with a bunch of giggling, pierced girls. No way would I interrupt.
I dug in my bag until I found a snapshot of Chase and me posing in front of a tattoo parlor on Sixth Street in Austin. Armed with it, I pushed through perspiring bodies until I reached the bar. By the time I got there, sweat glued my clothes to my skin and ran down the back of my neck. The place was an oven.
The bartender might have been thirty or ninety. She had a bush of salt and pepper hair, a beaky, porous nose, and displayed wrinkled, sun-damaged cleavage over a black leather halter-top.
“What can I get you?” Her voice somehow rose above the rumble of the band.
“Cranberry juice and soda?” Alcohol robbed me of what little control I had over my second sight. I shoved another cigarette in my mouth and sat down.
“What kinda booze you want in it?”
“Nothing. Just the juice and soda.” I dug in my pocket for more money.
“Same price either way.” She propped her hands on her hips and cocked her head at me, squinting.
I nodded.
“Look,” she said, “I know who you are. Rae sat right where you are and drew a picture of you one day.”
Why did everybody who knew Rae, even just as an acquaintance, know all about me? While alive, she treated me like shit on her shoe. As a ghost, she played the same game. I didn’t understand our relationship at all.
“Now, look. The management here at Long Time Gone is sorry to hear what happened to Rae. But it don’t have nothing to do with us. We don’t have no informati
on for you.”
My heart stuttered. What the hell did she mean? I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar. Deer in the headlights described me to a tee.
“Ma’am? I’m not here about Rae.” I slid the picture across the bar. “I’m looking for my friend, Chase Fischer.”
“I told that boy earlier—afore I kicked him out—and I’ll tell you, I didn’t hardly know Rae, and I don’t know”—she leaned down and made an ugly face—“or care if some boyfriend of hers might come in here sometimes. And I don’t have to talk to you anyway since you ain’t the po-lice.”
My mind fell over and played dead. The old hag’s nastiness shocked me into confusion. Hell, I couldn’t even get pissed off and punch her in the face.
“Now, I’m sorry ‘bout how Rae ended up, but it don’t have nothing to do with nobody here. We ain’t liable.” The bartender raised her arm and made a motion.
A huge hand grabbed my arm and turned me around. I was face to face with the bearded doorman again.
“You causing trouble already?” He grinned that curiously out-of-place-grin and tugged me away from the bar without waiting for an answer.
“Wait a minute,” I struggled to get away from him, but he had no trouble holding onto me.
The doorman frog marched me to the door. The peanut gallery loved the show, shouting and cheering behind us. He pushed me out into the parking lot and stood barring my way back inside.
“I just wanted to ask some questions.” Having never been thrown out of anywhere, the humiliation surprised me. The bikers on the deck hooted and hollered at the action, which made it worse.
“I can’t answer your questions, ma’am.” He sounded a little apologetic, but he didn’t move a muscle. The top of my head barely reached his pectorals. My muscles coiled into painful knots, and the rage of impotence overflowed my emotions.
