The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  I was already halfway out the door when Caleigh ran and stuck herself to my legs like a burr. “Be careful, Mom.”

  I smoothed her penny hair. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart. Mothers are always all right. We have to be.” I kissed her, then ran out to the barn, pulled Zar from his grass paddock, and threw my saddle on a surprised horse.

  “Don’t give me that blinky look. We have to find the girls.” He snorted as I adjusted the bridle, cinched the girth, and swung up. “Let’s go find your friends.”

  4

  I gave Zar his head. He might find them from the sheer horsey desire to be with the herd. At the end of the drive he swung down South Road at the Five Corners, heading toward the tavern site. I didn’t warm him up as usual, but pushed him into a fast trot.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I kept repeating under my breath. I blamed myself for leaving the girls alone even for one minute. I knew I was panicking but couldn’t stop, slow myself down, stop my hands from trembling. I nearly dropped the reins. I felt Zar’s muscles tense along with my tension. He rolled into a canter, without my asking, as if he could read my mind. It was one of the reasons I hadn’t taken the truck. I told myself it would be easier to look for the girls on the smaller trails on horseback, that sudden headlights might frighten their horses, but really, I wanted a companion in my search, the reassurance of another breathing creature as I plummeted through the woods. I tried not to think, not to feel, but it was Jeremy I really wanted.

  The road was an arrow shot through the darkening canyon of trees, straight and ghostly white at dusk. It seemed to go on forever. My eyes began to ache from focusing to its end point among the trees, seeking without finding the forms of two horses, two girls. My head ached from willing them to appear. Something large and winged swooped over the road and I flinched, but Zar kept up his steady canter, his legs flying out over the ground. He slowed as we neared the old tavern road, grown over with tall grass. There was a disturbance, a flattening there. Some large animal had passed, or perhaps two. Surely it had been the girls and their horses. Zar seemed to think so. He plunged down the track, and I began calling for them. Bracken scratched at me, caught on my jeans. The darkness was closing around us, the trees loomed. I called their names as Zar pushed on, setting each hoof carefully on the narrow, rocky scrabble of the trail.

  We came to the tavern cellar hole, a black pit opening up at the end of the track. I pulled the flashlight from Zar’s saddlebag and jumped off.

  I shone the beam all down and around the rock enclosure, where nothing but weeds and fallen leaves lay. “Fai? Grace?” I called, while I aimed my flashlight into the woods, into crevices in the rocks, over the ground, searching for something, anything that might mean they were near. Suddenly the light picked up a clue, flecks of hay glistening from a mound of horse droppings that looked damp and fresh. Zar snuffed it, snorted, and shook his head, as if to tell me he didn’t know how to continue our search. But the fresh manure wasn’t what I smelled. I smelled lilacs.

  A chill shivered up my back. I searched and called all up and down the tavern track and Poverty Road as night fell and the lilac scent pursued me. I called for the twins, listening for something besides my own voice in the tangle of trees. Finally, the thought that Caleigh would be worried made me turn Zar toward home. By the time I reached the gate, I had convinced myself that they were back at the house eating junk. A dark so complete had fallen that Zar had to find his way home without any guidance from me. Surely, the twins had, too.

  But the barn, still blazing with light as I’d left it, was empty of their horses. I even looked over the tops of the stalls in case they were lying down, tuckered from their ride. All I saw was undisturbed bedding. I knew the horses weren’t out in the paddocks. They would have called to Zar as we came down the drive. But maybe they’d been benighted at some house on the main road, had already called home. I threw Zar’s saddle in a heap, secured him in his stall, and ran to the house.

  Caleigh and Nathan were playing cards at the kitchen table, the phones and the walkie-talkie between them. They looked expectantly at me when I raced through the door. Caleigh smiled wide. “You found them, didn’t you? I told Nathan you wouldn’t come home without them—” She saw my face and the light in her eyes dimmed. She looked down, resumed her shuffling.

  The kitchen door slammed, and I spun around, ready to scold the twins as they walked in as if nothing was wrong, as if they hadn’t scared us half to death. But it was Falcon Eddy, trailing vines, bleeding from deep gashes that tracked over his hands and face like roads on a map.

  “Are they here? Have they come home?”

  I shook my head.

  He wiped the blood that was seeping into his left eye. “I saw them leave, but was bound by these dratted vines.” He pulled at one wrapped around his barrel chest.

  I remembered my dream, of thorny vines climbing, twining through the window and into my office. “Vines here? In the house?”

  “I was sitting right over there, and thick green vines grew up around me in an instant. Before I knew it they had me wrapped tight as a tick. My face, as well, and I couldn’t speak a word. The girls just walked out the door as if they didn’t see me.”

  I looked at my hands, covered with scratches. I couldn’t call him a liar. I’d seen the thorny vines, too, felt their effects. “And then?”

  “I struggled free, went upstairs to find you. You were wrapped in the vines, too. I couldn’t wake you. Couldn’t wake Caleigh, nor Nathan. Tried to use my cell to call for help, but the thing didn’t work. None of them did. So I went off to find them.” He sighed. “Don’t know yet if I did right. But while I was tracking them, I saw a man from a far bit away, called to him had he seen two girls riding. He was fiddling with something in the back of his car. When he heard me, he raised a gun. So I shot my bow. Winged him in the shoulder, thought that would be enough to give him pause.” He swiped at another trickle of blood. “Only, it didn’t. He pulled out the arrow, leapt into the car, and was away.”

  I could barely breathe. “Were they … were they in the car?”

  “Dearie, I’m just not sure. I’m not as fast as I used to be, but I ran and leapt onto the bumper, held fast to the roof rack. But the windows were tinted, full black. I pounded, listened for any sound. Tried to climb onto the roof, so I could get to the driver. He turned onto a dry streambed, blasted over the gullies. Lost my hold, got dragged the better part of a mile before I was jounced off altogether. So. I don’t know. Got the license plate, but that doesn’t seem like much at all.” He shook his head. “I did go back to the spot where I’d shot the bugger, looked for the horses, more sign of girls. Saw nothing. Hoped they’d be here.”

  I’d started shaking as Falcon Eddy told his story. I reached for my phone, but it slipped from my hand. Nathan picked it up. I could see he was punching in 911.

  Caleigh said, “I know. I’ll deal them in, then they have to come back soon.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea, honey,” I said, trying for a steady voice. “You and Nathan go on playing, after he makes this phone call. Then you can have pickle and pimento.” Caleigh did not look up, even at the mention of her favorite sandwich meat. She was concentrating fiercely on bringing her sisters back to play their poker hands. But we would need stronger magic than that to bring them home.

  5

  Jolon wasn’t in uniform, and I was grateful for that, grateful for his tan chamois shirt, frayed at the cuffs, his worn jeans. He seemed like an old friend come to help us, not Hawley’s police chief. But two young women followed him, to collect “evidence” in Grace’s and Fai’s rooms. The word itself seemed cruel. More cruel still that my girls’ lives might be evidence of some crime, that other hands would touch things that were precious to them. Fai’s troll collection, Grace’s laptop with both Marilyn Manson and daisy stickers covering it. I felt how exposed they were, not only out in the night, not only to Rigel Voss, but in their own home. I felt like throwing up.

  I g
ave Jolon photographs of the twins, a video of them at our last endurance ride. He faxed the photographs to the state police, the environmental police. I gave him their cell phones, which I’d already checked for photos or contacts or messages that might lead me to them. I’d read the recent texts, to their friends and to each other. I kept thinking that if we were in the real world they’d have taken their phones, and they would have been trackable now. But there the phones were, like pink and green sores I kept picking at.

  Jolon brought me to the kitchen, closed the door. Falcon Eddy was there at the table, looking haggard and crestfallen. Jolon questioned Eddy first. He only raised an eyebrow at the mention of the vines.

  He sent Eddy to talk to the sketch artist who’d just arrived, then made a series of calls. He ordered roadblocks set up, told us police in all the surrounding states were now looking for the car. The man Eddy had shot would be caught soon.

  “You’re bleeding, Reve.” He took my hand. It was still bleeding, my palm pierced like a stigmata. I told him about the climbing vines that I’d thought were a dream.

  “Do you believe what Eddy told us?”

  “Crazy sounding or not, I know something of Falcon Eddy. Your Nan trusts him. She called me before she sent him to you.”

  That was news to me. “Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t you tell me? The guy just shows up here, and I’m supposed to just trust him? What if he kidnapped the girls himself?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s … well, let’s just say I’d be inclined to believe him. Most of his story, anyway. That he shot at the guy and hit him. Don’t know I’d go so far as to put it all down to enchantment, the way he seems to. But we’ll have a composite sketch soon.”

  We heard the search helicopter that Jolon had called in whupping above us. There wasn’t much else to be done while night covered the forest, he explained, and evidence there needed to be preserved. The helicopters carried infrared detection gear that would sense heat. Horses were big enough that the sensors would pick them up if they were in the forest. They hadn’t yet. And the horses hadn’t returned riderless, so the twins were probably out of the forest, riding on the roads. They had to be. Any other possibility didn’t bear thinking about. The drone of the helicopter gave me a weird sense of vertigo, and of time standing still.

  “I’ll have to ask you a lot of questions now, Reve,” Jolon said. “And some will be pretty personal.”

  I stopped at a window, saw my own reflection in the glass, hair snarled, hands clenched around my elbows, holding everything in. My hope that some small accident had stranded the girls—a lost horseshoe, a minor puncture wound—was fading fast. “I can’t help thinking about them out there in the dark, hurt or frightened or—”

  “Reve,” Jolon cut in, his voice gentle. “I need you to talk this through with me. That’s how you can help them now.”

  I nodded. I tried to drive the sick, lurching feeling back where it came from.

  “First of all, do you have any reason to believe the twins would take off without telling anyone?”

  “No. That’s not something they’d do.”

  “Did they want to move here? Didn’t they miss their school, their friends?” He hesitated, just for a beat. “Could they have run away?”

  “That just isn’t like them. They’d think of their horses first. They have nothing with them but some water. They didn’t take their packs. No grain for the horses, nothing even to tether them for the night. And they’re too smart to think they could ride back to Nevada. If they meant to leave, they would have taken one of my credit cards, booked a flight, got on a train or bus. But they didn’t. Every credit card, my cash, my bank card, are all accounted for. I checked my wallet, believe me.”

  Jolon wrote something, clicked his pen some more. “Okay. Let’s table the running-away possibility. I know your husband died earlier this year. Are you single now?”

  I must have looked at him like he had two heads.

  “I’m sorry.” His eyes turned down to his forms again before he asked, “Was your husband the girls’ father?”

  “God, yes!”

  “Reve, I’m just trying to ascertain if there’s anyone who might have reason to kidnap them. I have to be frank. For the girls’ sake.”

  I had to sit down. I slumped into the chair farthest from Jolon. “I know that. No, I don’t have a fiancé, a boyfriend, a lover. I work at home now, have no friends here, don’t know anyone but you. The girls are tutored at home. Nathan tutors them. He’s also their cousin, and lived with us for years. They have no boyfriends here, either, that I know of. I don’t know anyone who’d want to … to do anything to harm them. Except Rigel Voss.”

  “Reve,” he said my name again in a patient, calming voice that if anything, ratcheted up my terror. “I think we need to keep operating on the information that Rigel Voss is dead.”

  I glared at him. “All right, have it your way. The Fetch, then. Call him whatever you want, Jolon. Whoever he is, I know he’s here. I know he’s found us!”

  I suddenly remembered that Caleigh was still up, playing board games now with Nathan, plying her string as she did so. She didn’t need to know any of this, and she was probably listening in with her acute hearing. She would have to be questioned, as well. But that would be for the morning, when a child advocate would come out, Jolon had told me. A child advocate.

  I got up and shut the kitchen door. I poured myself some coffee, gulped it. The black coffee was too hot; it scalded my mouth.

  “As soon as I heard from you, I called the Las Vegas PD again,” Jolon told me. “Just to see if they could tell me anything more. But they couldn’t.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

  Jolon had also contacted the few bed-and-breakfasts and private campgrounds in the area. He even found the ranger who patrolled the state forest campground, playing darts at Pizza by Earl. The B and Bs had only families staying. It was late in the season for the state campground to have many takers, even with the warm weather. One single male, a bow hunter, had taken a cabin at Candy Cane Park two days before. Jolon sent two officers to the park, but they came up with nothing. They ran the guy’s New York plates, the car registered to an Abel Carmichael, a retired roofer from Syracuse, married, two grown sons. Nothing out of the ordinary, but they slunk up to the window for a closer look. The curtain was cracked, the guy watching TV, alone. They knocked on the door, showed their badges, asked him a few questions. Carmichael was just a guy from New York State hoping to bag a deer.

  “Why didn’t they search his cabin?”

  “No probable cause,” Jolon said. “We can’t haul in every stranger.”

  “Jolon, I know the Fetch is in Hawley. Let’s cut the crap.”

  “Okay. Whoever he is, he might be in Hawley. Let’s go with that. Have you received any more threats since that e-mail you forwarded to me?”

  “No. Only that one e-mail, saying he would find me. Us.”

  “You know the stalker’s a male?”

  “Speculating.” I sucked in more coffee. It smelled the way I imagined brimstone might. “Look, I know the detectives assigned to the case didn’t believe me. Did they tell you they think I planned Jeremy’s murder?”

  “Not in so many words. Anyway, I like to form my own opinions.” He looked at me in the deep way I knew so well, solemn, seeking, as if he might be reading my soul. “I know a lot has changed, but I know you, Reve. You didn’t plan your husband’s death, or the twins’ disappearance. Magician or not. Just so you know where I stand, and we can move on. I believe in your stalker. I believe he could have found you. I may not believe he’s who you think he is, but what I do need is some concrete evidence, something I can get a handle on, so we can find your girls. Until we know, let’s hope they’re just a little lost. Okay?”

  He was right, of course he was. “Okay.”

  “Now I’d like to take a look at the barn, and get a brush or saddle pad that has the horses’ scent, just in case we need
to bring in tracking dogs in the morning.”

  I nodded, took a ragged breath.

  “I’ll go out first at dawn,” Jolon said. “I have some experience tracking. The tracks will be all muddied up if we send dogs out first.” He saw my look. “I trained in Maine with a Native American Jesuit priest who’s one of the best trackers in the country. I went to police academy, and then worked in Worcester County. I still kept my hand in as a consultant to the state police as a tracker. Eventually, they hired me on full-time, to lead search and rescue in eastern Mass. A few months ago, the police chief job came up in Hawley. So here I am. The state cops would ordinarily be in charge, but I was asked to head up this search, since I have the experience and know the forest so well.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Reve, is it a problem that I’m the one in charge of the investigation?”

  I looked into his clear eyes and lied outright. “Not at all.” Although I knew it would be. A problem for me, but more so for him. I knew he would never rest until my girls were found. That’s how it had always been with us. Jolon would do anything for me. That was the way he loved me. He still did. That was in his eyes, too. I wanted to warn him, I wanted to tell him how dangerous I was to anyone who loved me, how anyone without a death wish should just stay away from me. But my girls needed him and I was silent.

  The hall clock tolled midnight. We waited in silence for the twelve deep tones to sound, like the extinguishing of hope. Grace and Fai had been gone nine hours.

  6

  Caleigh was curled up on the sofa, fast asleep. Nathan dozed near her.

  I went up to my office. I went for the Book. I walked right by the mirror across from my desk. I didn’t look directly in it. I knew I looked like hell. The mirror had been downstairs when Jolon and I were children. We had peered through the windows into its silver plane, speckled with age. The mirror made us look like ghost children. Now, my eye caught the edge of it, and I had to look again. I didn’t see myself at all, just the reflection of black sky, and the portrait of my great-great-grandmother.