by Susan Slater
She took a break around two when Carolyn and Phillip arrived with Dona Mari, who was to begin cleaning the upstairs bedrooms. They also had Eric in tow. He was moving out to the hangar, and he and Phillip would begin to assess the plane’s needs that afternoon. Apparently, Phillip was sincere about wanting to buy it.
She and Carolyn took cans of Diet Coke out to the porch and sat in the swing. They shared memories of the Double Horseshoe from finer days.
“Doesn’t look like there’s much work going on around here.”
The booming voice made her jump, but it was Carolyn who invited Judge Cyrus to join them. He must have been down at the barns.
“Can’t, but I thank you ladies. Got to go meet with that vet and see how much money he needs. He’s down there now working on the figures. Managing this trust is becoming a full-time job.” But Elaine could tell that he didn’t mind. He had been close to Billy Roland. The judge touched his hat and gave a slight nod, then paused like he’d had second thoughts about joining them and walked back up the porch steps.
“Did I see Eric Linden with Phillip just now?”
“They’re taking a look at the Lear,” Carolyn volunteered.
“I remember when Billy Roland bought that thing over by Dallas. We all thought it was just one more white elephant. The boys got plans for it?” Judge Cyrus said.
“If they can get it together, Phillip’s going to use it during the campaign.”
“You don’t say.” The judge leaned against the porch railing. “Either of you lovely ladies know Eric’s intentions after the plane gets fixed?”
“Why do you ask?” Elaine leaned forward.
“Oh, no reason, really…might have a job for him if he’s interested.” He looked at Elaine. “I can’t believe he survived that flash flood. You’d have to have more than nine lives to do that, wouldn’t you think?”
Elaine shrugged.
“Did he ever figure out who promised him that two million that he thought was waiting for him in Midland Savings and Loan?”
“He has some ideas,” Elaine said and then wondered immediately why she said it. Judge Cyrus had never been a favorite, and he was beginning to irritate. If she’d just kept quiet, he’d probably have gone back to the barns.
“And what would those be, if I can be snoopy here?” He was watching her with shrewd, narrowed eyes, and Elaine felt just a little discomfort.
“Dan has uncovered a new angle. Something to do with J.J. Rodriguez. He’s in Albuquerque now talking with Albert Reyes.”
It wasn’t her imagination—the judge’s pudgy fingers tightened around the porch railing.
“You don’t say. Thought that Mahoney character was a smart one…smart enough to catch the eye of the prettiest almost-widow in the county.” He was the only one laughing as he reached over to poke Elaine’s knee.
Elaine got up abruptly. “I better get back to work.”
“Me, too. Didn’t mean to break up the sewing bee.” More laughter, as the judge hopped down the steps.
Carolyn and Elaine watched him walk back toward the barns in that peculiar swinging gait of persons with abnormally short legs.
“I’ve never liked him,” Elaine volunteered. “Aside from the sexist stuff, he just gives me the creeps.”
“I know what you mean.” Carolyn yawned and stretched and said she was going down to the hangar if she could find the keys to a pickup. Elaine went back to the study and heard a truck drive by the window about fifteen minutes later and guessed the keys had been found.
She didn’t mind working alone; in fact, she rather enjoyed it. Sometimes the packing went quickly. Sets of anything, she listed in their entirety and barely opened each book, just checked its binding and overall wear and tear. Some of the older collector’s items needed gluing along their spines.
She wasn’t keeping track of time and was faintly surprised to realize it had gotten dark. She closed the windows and the blinds and moved the floor lamp more to the center of the floor, where she was just beginning to catalogue a rather involved set of personal papers in leather binders, a collection of essays on grazing and grazing rights by Billy Roland’s father.
She listened but couldn’t hear Dona Mari upstairs. Perhaps she had finished; it was almost seven. It might be a good idea for her to do the same. She walked down the hall to the kitchen. There was a basket of fresh fruit on a sideboard. A leftover from the funeral, probably, because there was little else to eat. She finally found some crackers in the pantry and a half-eaten round of New York cheddar in the back of the fridge. It crossed her mind to make a picnic and go down to the hangar and see how the work was progressing. Then she smiled. There was no reason to feed Eric. He needed to learn to take care of himself. There were just some habits that died hard. She sat at the kitchen table, peeled an apple and ate a hunk of cheese.
She walked out the back door a little after seven and continued down to the barns. She’d round up Simon and head back to Roswell. Dan would probably be getting back in the next hour or so.
“You’re going to kill me. I got busy. Last time I saw him he was heading after a pickup going out to the hangar.”
She felt like strangling Hank but all she said was, “Thanks. I’ll check out that way,” and got a set of keys to a pickup, there was no taking the Benz across the fields. She knew that Simon wouldn’t get lost. At least, she hoped he wouldn’t. He wasn’t used to wide open spaces, but more than likely he was at the hangar.
But he wasn’t. Phillip and Carolyn had seen him chasing along the edge of the woods sometime earlier, maybe an hour earlier.
“Where’s Eric?”
“Went off someplace with the judge,” Phillip said.
Elaine felt a twinge of uneasiness, but couldn’t figure out why; the judge was probably offering him work. “I’m heading back to town after I find Simon. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
She sat in the pickup trying to decide what to do. It was a safe bet that Simon was somewhere in the woods. She was kicking herself for not watching him more closely; the woods stretched for five miles along the creek. Maybe if she drove along the edge and got out and called him every once in a while…she was anxious to get back to Roswell and Dan; and she still had a two-hour drive ahead of her. Kids and pets could both be a pain in the ass, sometimes.
***
His head didn’t just hurt; it throbbed in between sharp daggers of pain that seemed to have dimmed the sight in his left eye. Dan held the cold cloth against the fast-rising knot at the crown and filled in Roger and Tom with his suspicions.
“So you think the judge might have had a reason to keep Eric undercover for awhile? Might have had something to do with the ritualistic killing?” Tom was talking and eating trail mix at the same time.
“As good a guess as I can come up with. I can place the death of the girl four days before the bust. She worked for Judge Cyrus. Eric will be able to tell us if she’s the one he knew.”
“And you think this altar place out here is worth checking tonight?”
“Couldn’t hurt.” Dan was beginning to feel some urgency to find Eric, headache or no. And, since Simon was with him, where was Elaine?
“How much farther is it?” Roger held the flashlight in his face.
“A mile, maybe more.” Dan reached up and Roger helped him stand.
“You going to be okay?”
“Yeah. Let’s get going.” Dan wasn’t too thrilled that Simon was coming along; might ruin any surprise element, but it was too late now, or was it? “Either of you have some rope or something I can use to tie Simon? Might be better to leave him behind and come back for him later.”
Tom produced a twenty-foot piece of nylon rope and Dan secured Simon to the trunk of a young cottonwood. Dan used the commands they had learned in school and hoped Simon would obey; then the three of them angled back toward the stream to begin following it south. If Dan wanted to be really truthful, he wasn’t sorry he had company. Maybe it was the memory of what he had seen in the w
oods recently, or what he knew about human offerings in the past, but whatever it was, he felt uneasy.
The first mile was uneventful. Fallen leaves muffled their steps and the overgrown brush hid their movements, but the going was slow. Branches tore at their clothing and caught in their hair. Dan felt the sleeve on his windbreaker get snagged on a branch that he’d tried to duck.
“Just a minute. I’m caught here. It’s torn through to the lining.”
Roger and Tom helped him get untangled.
“What was that?” Roger switched off his flashlight.
“Sounded like drums.”
The three of them stood silently straining to hear.
“There it was again. Did you hear it?” Tom whispered.
“It’s coming from over this way.” Roger had already turned and began to thread his way through the brush away from the stream.
“Must be one doozy of a drum. Big mother,” Roger said.
“Brass gong.”
“What?” Roger turned to Dan.
“That last ringing sound must be a gong of some sort. The sound carries like a tuning fork.” Instinctively, Dan dropped to the ground. “If we’re going to get any closer and not attract attention, we better do it this way.”
Crouched low Dan ran forward, then suddenly motioned for Tom and Roger to hit the ground beside him.
“Holy shit.” Tom let his breath out in a low whistle.
“What’s going on?”
“Service of some sort.” Dan wasn’t comfortable talking, but they were a safe seventy-five feet from the altar and had a panoramic view of what was happening.
Five drummers, naked except for loin cloths and body paint, knelt beside three-foot-high hollowed logs with taut animal skin coverings, striking their instruments at rhythmic intervals. He had been right, a five-foot brass plate hung between two sapling cottonwoods and every three minutes was struck by someone dressed in a flowing white robe.
Most of the congregation, if that’s what they could be called, wore headdresses imbedded with slivers of glass that caught the light of the hundreds of candles that marked the boundaries of the pit-like sanctuary. Excluding the drummers, there had to be thirty people, men and women, dressed in white, wearing masks, body paint, or both, kneeling on mats in a semicircle facing a dais.
The altar in the center was covered with flowers and ribbons that trailed along the ground. The strange, bitter yet fragrant odor of incense hung in the air and wafted to where Dan was crouched. It was intense and penetrating, roses, gardenias, sandalwood, cloves and probably half a dozen other ingredients; he only hoped he didn’t start sneezing.
Suddenly four people with tambourines stepped from the woods to stand behind the drummers and began to hit their instruments with the heels of their hands. Their robes were hooded and fell forward, hiding their faces. Dan couldn’t help but feel he might recognize some of the people without their finery.
Dan felt the reverberations before he realized that the drummers had increased the tempo. Now, the sound enveloped them, filled the sanctuary, escaping up through the trees to drift out over the night. Dan huddled with Roger and Tom and watched as the congregation began to sway and wave their arms, increasing in speed until two women carrying enormous wicker baskets walked toward the crowd from behind the dais and sprinkled something in sweeping motions over their heads. Rose petals, Dan guessed, as the scent of the flowers reached him. This offering seemed to appease the crowd, which fell silent, but not for long.
Dan’s ears were ringing even before a young man stepped up beside the gong and struck it, not once but three times. Again, silence, only the humming until the sound gradually wore itself out. But this time Dan could almost feel the anticipatory excitement as the crowd murmured and shifted position to lie flat in a supplicant’s pose, all thirty people face down, arms extended, palms up.
In a burst of fragmented light that danced in the air and sizzled and popped from the tips of the sparklers embedded in the edge of the dais, six warrior-men stepped forward, each supporting his side of a portable throne, an enormous stool with curved arms and no back on a miniature platform secured to three four by fours that extended beyond the base to become carrying poles.
Dan couldn’t take his eyes off the figure in the middle in a violet cassock of satin trimmed with gold scrolling and what looked like thousands of beads or buttons sewn along the hem, his long legs encased in white satin breeches and knee-high black riding boots. But on his head was a three-foot-tall headdress of deep purple that flowed train-like behind him, forming a tent around his shoulders and spilling over the edge of the airborne platform. A mask of white feathers covered every inch of his face and he sat sphinx-like, long arms folded in his lap, hands encased in white gloves, only moving his head to nod here and there blessing his followers.
Slowly moving with the beat of the drums, the warriors carried their impressive leader through the crowd. Acrobatic dancers, their green and purple costumes covered with tiny bells, waved additional sparklers and frolicked around the throne turning somersaults over worshipers. The result was a cacophony of sound. But it wasn’t just sound. Dan marveled at how all his senses were assaulted, pushed to their limits, making his head ache with overload.
The chants reached a crescendo as the sparklers sputtered to darkness and were replaced by tall white candles in front of the throne. The warriors returned to the dais, but it soon became evident that they would continue to hold the man on the throne aloft and not place him on the ground. It probably wasn’t such a bad idea, Dan thought; it certainly added to the majesty of it all.
Next, six women, naked to the waist in diaphanous skirts, nipples erect in the chilly night air, and garlands of flowers encircling their heads, danced around the throne, finally coming to rest at the feet of a warrior. After each pushed a jester away and feigned reclaiming her rightful spot, she offered flowers and a lighted candle to the man seated above her, who accepted her offering with a nod of his head. Yet, Dan had a feeling that it was all just a prelude for something else—a warm-up act, and he didn’t have long to wait.
Bursting through a thicket of trees behind the drummers, a bronzed man, his body painted in chevron stripes of yellow and red, swung a machete-long knife above his head, circling and dipping to the low beat of the drums as he made his way to the altar and kicked up flower petals with each step.
Then as someone struck the gong, four more warriors carried a stretcher containing what looked like a body in a white satin robe to the base of the stone mass, where it took all four of them to heave the body upright and place it on its back over the altar.
“Give me the binoculars,” Dan hissed. He was suddenly frantic. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was going to be a sacrifice. A human one, if the shape of the bundle didn’t lie. He focused on the altar and watched as the topless dancers moved forward to caress the body while they anointed it with some kind of oil.
Then they covered the body with theirs, pretending to what? Keep it safe? Shield it from harm? They moved in a mesmerizing circle, arms waving, scattering more flower petals before stopping on cue and stepping back. It took Dan a moment to realize that there was suddenly no sound. The worshippers were still prone and absolutely motionless. The man on the throne was staring in front of him. A light wind moved through the branches overhead, ruffling the feathers of the costumes and picking up tiny swirls of flower petals; in the distance a coyote called to a mate.
Then trance-like a dancer stepped to the altar and working slowly pulled apart the white satin robe, exposing the neck and finally the head of the body that had been tossed across the pile of stones. Eric Linden. In a rush of sound the drummers rolled to a crescendo as the warrior with the machete swung the heavy knife over his head and approached the altar.
Dan was on his feet, running, crashing through the brush, yelling for the craziness to stop. But that was when he saw Elaine, gun cradled in her outstretched hands, drop to one knee and take aim at
the high priest. The rest was bedlam. The dancers scattered, stumbling over worshippers. The knife-wielding warrior dashed into the woods. And before Elaine could shoot, the warriors facing her saw the gun and dropped their poles to follow the others.
The throne tilted violently to the right, but as Dan watched, only the head of the priest slipped from view. His body remained stationary—massive squared shoulders, folded arms, gloved hands, legs in high leather boots—nothing moved. It was a shell. A hollowed-out facade that allowed the diminutive body of a dwarf, in this case Judge Franklin Cyrus, to stand upright behind it, looking for all the world like a six-foot-six ruler of the underworld.
***
It was late before Eric, Elaine and Dan returned to the house. Roger and Tom had taken a few key players and the judge into custody. Most of the audience in the woods had turned out to be former workers from the Double Horseshoe. Disgruntled at their termination and eager to celebrate the demise of the man they, no doubt, were told had caused it. But that part really couldn’t be proved, so those who hadn’t escaped into the woods at the start were detained as illegal aliens and faced deportation.
The Roswell sheriff’s department sent help, manpower and transportation. Roger and Tom were in their element, giving orders and accepting the kudos. No doubt sensing their imminent fame.
Phillip and Carolyn watched all the excitement but begged off coming back to the house. They were taking Dona Mari home, probably secretly relieved that she was with them and not caught in the woods.
Dan was the last to reach the house after going back for Simon and Baby Belle. By the time he got there, Elaine had produced a bottle of Glenlivet that she’d found hidden in the bookcase, and brought ice and glasses in from the kitchen. Dan helped her uncover the furniture. It seemed like the right place to be, in Billy Roland’s study, now that they had all the answers.
He silently toasted his friend with two fingers of good scotch, and fervently wished Billy Roland could be there to enjoy it with him. Dan wondered how much his old friend had known about the judge, the strange rituals in his woods. Had he suspected? Let them turn the runway lights on in the past as a signal to gather? Billy Roland had lived out here a little too long not to know the peccadilloes of his friends.
