Mystery Dance: Three Novels

by Scott Nicholson

  “I don’t think my lease allows it,” she said to the manager.

  “Well, you think about it.” He waved.

  “I will,” she said, getting in the car. I most definitely will.

  As she drove back to town, she thought of what she’d written in her journal this morning, wondered if it was the kind of thing Dr. Forrest wanted. She’d awakened on the first brittle cry of the alarm, the clock having kept time through the night. Even before going to the bathroom and brushing her teeth, she opened a notebook and wrote down her dream.

  The same dream.

  The one of the bones hidden under the floor.

  The floor wasn’t the one in her house, or of any house she had lived in. It was of long wooden planks, tongue-in-groove hardwood. For some strange dream-reason, she had to keep the secret of the buried bones from others. She was pretty sure she hadn’t buried the bones, hadn’t killed anyone, but that part of the dream wasn’t very clear.

  Maybe Dr. Forrest would know what it meant. Dr. Forrest had helped her decipher an earlier dream, one where Julia was pregnant and a snake was trying to take her baby. According to the Freudian interpretation, the snake was her father, and the fetus was herself as a small child. Therefore, Julia’s father had stolen her childhood, and was the one to blame for Julia’s current disorder.

  She was still thinking about her father when she pulled into the parking lot of the Courier-Times office. The afternoon sun was behind her, and she saw her reflection coming to meet her in the glass of the front door. Did she look like her father? She could scarcely remember his true face, only the one she had fashioned out of dim memory. Was he alive? Why had he left her? How much of him still lived on in her? How much should she hate him?

  She shivered, even though the day was warm, and went inside. Rick was waiting in the chair beside her desk.

  “Hey there,” he said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. And thanks for last night. I really needed to get out.”

  “Yeah, I could tell. Maybe you need to get out more?” He leaned toward her, smiling, as she sat.

  “Are you asking me?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “You know I’m engaged, right?”

  He waved his hands as if brushing aside a cobweb. “You’ve been here four months, and I’ve not seen any sign of this knight in shining armor. He can’t be too big a part of your life.”

  Julia booted up her computer. Rick finally decided she wasn’t going to take the bait. “So, what did you think of my Satanic murder theory?”

  “Pretty creative,” she said. “I guess you’re going to need a little evidence before you run it. Or even get editorial approval to stick with the chase.”

  Rick sat back and put his hands behind his head, sprawling in the chair, casually accepting her rebuff. “The Independent is all over this case. Sometimes I hate being a weekly. They beat us on almost everything. Except they aren’t working the Satanic angle.”

  “They don’t have time for the depth of coverage that we get, either.”

  “The cops identified the victim.”

  Julia nodded, half-listening, clicking her way through her files. “Poor guy.”

  “Charles Edward Williams. Age 39. Last known address, Memphis, Tennessee.”

  Julia froze over her keyboard. “Memphis?”

  “Your old stomping grounds. Is it known as a hotbed of Satanism?”

  “Well, aside from Elvis selling his soul to the devil and Richard Nixon…and we all know how that turned out.”

  “Eternal life on a hundred thousand collector plates and black velvet paintings, but in exchange, he had to die drugged out on the porcelain altar.”

  “You are so delicate, Rick.”

  “Yep. Journalism hardens your heart, and that explains everything,” he said, shifting into a mocking tone. “How long did you say you’ve been a reporter?”

  “Very funny. Do the police have any new leads?”

  “No. They’ve shipped the body off to the state medical examiner’s office. Should be able to tell if the guy was drugged when he died. If the Brotherhood used him as a sacrifice, they probably had to drug him pretty heavily.”

  “Unless the sacrifice was voluntary. What’s this ‘Brotherhood’ business?”

  “One of the names Satanists use for their group.”

  “Boy, even Satanists are sexist. What’s the world coming to?”

  Rick’s face grew serious. “Are you religious?”

  “More spiritual than religious,” she said, expecting Rick to ask which church she attended. She considered telling him she was a Scientologist or Moonie, something offbeat that might throw him off the scent. “I believe in a higher power. I just don’t think you need an escort to get you there, and you don’t have to kiss the Pope’s ring, the Buddha’s feet, or Pat Robertson’s ass.”

  Rick nodded and smiled. “Sorry to put you on the spot. Some people get touchy about things like that.”

  Julia almost asked Rick about his spiritual beliefs, but decided against it. What if he’d only taken her out to dinner to try to convert her? She liked the idea of being desirable company better than that of looking like a lost soul. Too many people lately had seemed hell-bent on saving her. “Well, for the sake of intellectual argument, I don’t think Satan exists, but I’m willing to believe that other people do, and that they might perform all kinds of crazy acts in the delusion of devotion.”

  “One thing’s strange. There’s a case a couple of years ago that never got solved. A little girl was stabbed to death. They found her body out in the woods.”

  “That’s sickening.” Julia’s heart clenched. “Any suspects?”

  “A few names were kicked around. Deacon Hartley’s came up the most often.”

  “Hartley? That’s a common local name, isn’t it?”

  “There’s a few dozen of them, been here since the buffalo walked these mountains.”

  “Any rumors of Satanism with that murder?”

  “No. But that’s the kind of thing the police like to keep quiet. Especially when they can’t solve it. Maybe my series will be called ‘The New Satanism.’ Catchy, huh?”

  “Better get some more evidence first. Otherwise, you’ll come off as preachy. Besides, even the Baptists have pretty much given up the idea of Satan.”

  “If I were the devil, Elkwood would make a fine place to get started on that Armageddon thing. Go where people are the most complacent in their faith.”

  “You’re just stirring up controversy for the sake of that journalism creed, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’”

  “It wins press awards,” Rick said. “Satanism’s got everything you want in a story. Murder, drugs, bondage, orgies, and the ultimate in good versus evil.”

  She thought about sharing her tidbit of the disappearing animals, but if he was going to go ahead and run his stories on nothing but rumor, theory, and a handful of spotty research, she wanted to distance herself as much as possible. If Rick would let her. “Well, good luck, but don’t take it personally if I hope your story is a dead end. I’d better get back to work. Deadline. You know.”

  “Yeah.” Rick stood and adjusted his glasses. He paused at the door to her tiny office. “Mind if I call you later?”

  Whether he was a Christian soldier hell-bent on recruitment or a chronic womanizer, he sure didn’t know when to give up. His cheeks wrinkled when he smiled, like a young Robert Redford in “All The President’s Men.” He’d probably practiced it in the mirror. “I’m pretty busy,” she said. “Maybe some other time?”

  “Sure. After you’re married, maybe.”

  “It won’t be your problem.” She smiled at him, hoping he didn’t take it as a sign that she was ready to roll back her sheets and let him slide his lithe, fitness-club physique onto her mattress. She wondered if his moral compass allowed him to seduce another man’s fiancee, and decided most men only followed one compass, and it was the pointy one in their pants. “Thanks for last night.�
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  Rick straightened up, seeing something in her eyes, the old cockiness back on his face. “We’ll do it again sometime. Real soon.”

  After he left, Julia finished her article, downloaded her digital photographs, and drove home. By the time she’d put away her camera and satchel, dusk was still an hour away. She decided to take a walk down the little trail that ran through the woods behind the house.

  Artificial courage. It works for drunks, so maybe it will work for me.

  She locked the door behind her and put the key ring and mace in her pocket. With many of the leaves falling, she’d be able to keep the house in sight along much of the walk. Autumn was her favorite season, and she wasn’t going to deny herself the pleasure of it all just because some knife-wielding Creep could be waiting behind a tree.

  The trail ran down to a little creek. There, the forest was more welcoming than threatening. Autumn wasn’t just a glorious color show. The season had a taste and a smell. Julia relished the sweet decay of leaves in the air, the late-blooming goldenrod and rust-topped Joe Pye weed, rushing water that was silver clean against the rocks. Away from civilization, with only the wild woods and water and sinking sun for company, she felt perfectly normal and worry free. But the sun always set, and darkness always fell, and she was not alone in the world.

  The other end of the trail bordered Mabel Covington’s back yard. Yellow apples lay on the ground beneath a gnarled tree and two quilts hung on the woman’s clothesline, airing out for winter. The grass was thick and nearly blue. The aroma of fried chicken came from the kitchen of the large colonial house.

  Mrs. Covington appeared at the door of the screened-in back porch. “Hey there, Julia,” she called. “Saw you from the window. How you doing?”

  “Fine, Mrs. Covington. Taking a walk. How are you?”

  “Just dandy. Won’t you come in for a piece of pie? I haven’t seen you in a while.” A gray cat appeared between Mrs. Covington’s ankles, its tail brushing the hem of the woman’s dress as it pussyfooted down the wooden steps.

  Julia was about to decline the offer, but Mrs. Covington’s smile radiated from her ice-blue eyes as well. Julia stepped through the low hedge and started across the yard. “Thanks. That would be nice of you.”

  “No, just neighborly. With all these outsiders coming in, people don’t keep up with their neighbors much anymore. We all got to watch out for each other, especially out here on Buckeye Creek.”

  Julia braced herself for a lecture that would condemn anyone who dared to be born somewhere besides Amadahee County, but the woman only held the door open until Julia entered the house. They sat at the wobbly, hand-crafted cherry table in the kitchen, though Mrs. Covington had a large dining room with a beautiful walnut table. The whole house was filled with enough rustic antiques to make a scavenger drool.

  Mrs. Covington set down plates with thick wedges of cherry pie on them, a scoop of vanilla ice cream to the side leaking white into the red filling. Julia accepted a cup of coffee, waited until Mrs. Covington shooed a black cat out of the kitchen, and then they ate together.

  “This is delicious,” Julia said.

  “Thank you kindly,” the woman said, her false teeth stained by the cherries. “Don’t have no call to cook much anymore, with my Archibald dead and the boys living out West. It’s nice to have somebody I can fuss over.”

  She patted Julia’s hand.

  “I only hope this doesn’t spoil my appetite for dinner,” Julia said, before lifting another forkful.

  “A girl your age ought not worry about what she eats. There’s a lot of that going on, I hear, girls throwing up and wasting away because they’re scared of getting fat. A real man doesn’t mind a little meat on the bone.”

  Julia grinned. She wasn’t called a girl very often, not at twenty-seven. “No need to worry. I’m not afraid of a few extra pounds.”

  Only other things. Lions and tigers and bears and Satanic cults, oh my.

  “Mrs. Covington–”

  The woman held up a wrinkled hand. “How many times do I got to tell you? Call me ‘Mabel.’“

  “Okay, Mabel.”

  “Walter Triplett’s been around a right good bit lately.”

  “He seems like he knows what he’s doing.”

  “A real fix-it man,” Mrs. Covington said. “Fixed everything up real nice. Got away with murder, some say.”

  “Murder?”

  “I shouldn’t be airing out nobody else’s dirty laundry,” Mrs. Covington said, as if she didn’t get the opportunity as often as she liked. “But a body ought to keep themselves informed. So it ain’t gossip, it’s more just passing along information.”

  Julia gripped her purse tighter. The falling dusk suddenly felt like a suffocating blanket, a funeral shroud for the living. The cat jumped into Mrs. Covington’s lap, barely visible except for the green glow of its eyes. The woman stroked it and resumed rocking.

  “Walter lost his wife about eight years back. When I say ‘lost,’ that’s exactly what I mean. They was out camping on Cracker Knob yonder.” The woman waved a trembling arm toward unseen mountains. “And Walter came back the next day and said she had disappeared. Just up and walked off in the middle of the night. Of course, they rounded up a big search team, every man what could walk and even a few women, and went over every square inch of that mountain. Never was no sign of her.”

  The chair’s squeaking was amplified by the silence of the night. Julia noticed for the first time how softly night descended, how it crept up around you, drifted from the trees, rose like smoke while simultaneously descending like dark snow. Insidious, slow, and determined.

  “Walter swears up and down she was right next to him in their little tent, sleeping one minute, gone the next. Didn’t take her hiking boots or nothing, just whatever clothes she was wearing at the time. And she was a Stamey, old family. Not the sort to do foolish things, raised to know a little bit about the woods.”

  “Poor Walter,” Julia found herself saying. So that was the thing she had seen in his eyes, the bit of gray haunting the brown of his irises. A sadness buried deep.

  “Poor Walter, maybe. But poorer for her, I’d say. ‘Course, there is all kinds of caves and cliff edges on Cracker Knob where a body could meet the Maker, but a mountain girl would know to watch out for such dangers. And a mountain girl wouldn’t wander off in the dead of night no way.”

  Mrs. Covington spoke as if looking through the mist of years. “Some say Walter kind of helped her along in her disappearing act. That he helped her over a cliff, if you know what I mean. Or maybe strangled her and tucked her in some of those rock crevices on the north slope.”

  “He seems okay to me. He’s polite.”

  “Well, I hate to speculate on things I don’t know for sure, but I hear the Stamey girl was pregnant when she went missing.”

  The pie felt like a lump of wood in her throat as she imagined a scared young woman wandering lost in the wild mountains, with their granite rock shelves and laurel tangles.

  “Of course, that ain’t too surprising, since they hung out with Hartley,” Mrs. Covington asked.

  The name clanged a faint but disturbing bell. “What about Hartley?”

  “Deke Hartley lived in that house for five years. A strange old coot. Burned the lights through the night, came and went at all hours, never seemed to settle into a routine. I never trusted nobody who didn’t have a routine.”

  “What’s that have to do with weird noises in the woods?”

  “All the Hartleys is rough, but Deke managed to stay out of trouble. Some said he was up to funny business, though. I never was one to snoop in other people’s affairs, myself, but a body tends to hear gossip.”

  Despite her unease, Julia hid a grin behind another bite of pie. She suspected she was about to hear everything Mrs. Covington didn’t want to talk about.

  “I reckon he was into drugs,” Mrs. Covington said. “The strangest smells used to come from that house. People would come by to vis
it in the dead of night, and you’d never get to see their faces. About drove me batty, trying to keep up with the coming and going.”

  “Mr. Webster told me the former tenant ran out on his lease, and that the house had been sitting empty.”

  “He ran out on everything. Left all his clothes, the television on, food in the fridge, like he just up and walked off the end of the earth. His car was sitting in the driveway for three weeks, never moved, when I finally called the police. I reckon they’ve still got him down as a missing-persons case. That was about two years back, if I remember right. About the time that little girl got killed.”

  Julia wondered why Mr. Webster hadn’t told her any of this. Maybe he was scared she would have backed out of signing the lease. And the fate of the previous tenant wasn’t the type of thing one usually inquired about when house hunting. Julia didn’t believe that houses could be haunted, whether the ghosts were dead things or only memories. The house had been a good choice, solid and cheap, despite these revelations. Just enough peace to allow her time to think, and just enough people around to avoid a sense of total isolation. Even if the neighborhood boxer enjoyed spreading little land mines around.

  She scooped up the last of her dessert, a bit of crust softened by the ice cream. “You don’t think he’s missing, do you?”

  Mabel Covington’s eyes flicked left and right. “I hear things myself, sometimes. When it’s dark, people coming through the woods. See, I think they stashed some drugs or money or something, and they want to get it back. Only they don’t want to get discovered by having somebody file breaking and entering charges, so they’re waiting for the right time. I got a feeling Hartley likes to be missing.”

  And I thought I was paranoid. Maybe SHE could use an hour or two in Dr. Forrest’s office.

  Julia wiped the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “Thank you for the pie,” she said. “That was the best I’ve ever had.”

  “You do my heart glad,” the old woman said. “I won’t even share no credit with the corporation that boxed it up.”