The Witch's Grave: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  In a flash he was standing by the car. His overalls were grimy, flannel shirt ripe. Hair unwashed for decades obscured his forehead. Suddenly his hand shot into the cab and turned off the engine. My keys were in his pocket before I knew what he was doing.

  “Don’t want you to run off.” His smile was gone.

  I was trying to think what weapon I might have in the car, a tire iron, even the flashlight under the seat. He jerked the door open.

  “Dixon don’t want you to know this,” he whispered, “we had a fight about it, so I got to talk fast.”

  I struggled to remember which of the brothers was named Dixon—the silent one?

  “Our house is sealed.”

  I twisted in my seat. “I need you to give me my keys back, Donny.”

  “I will,” he whispered, his eyes imploring me to silence. “But you got to help us.”

  “I can’t help you if you keep my keys.”

  “No, I mean you got to help us.” He grabbed my arm, flung me out of the truck, nearly facedown in the dirt. He was dragging me toward the house. I panicked, flailed.

  “Hold still!” he growled.

  I had barely gotten my feet under me when the silent brother, Dixon, appeared, blocking the way in front of us, wordless and scowling.

  “He’s the only one can do it, Dix,” Donny said, his face red, fists full of my sweater. “I know your feelings on the subject, but damn. We can’t have it like this.”

  Dixon stood his ground, still as granite.

  I don’t know where Dover came from, not from the house, but he appeared, tackled Dixon; they rolled over the nasturtiums. Donny used the moment to haul me closer to the cabin door. Struggling was useless; his forearms were the size of a cow’s head and he was used to wrestling wild swine.

  I tried sitting; he dragged. I grabbed a smooth black rock set in the garden path and swung it at his head. He ducked and ignored.

  I was on the steps, hit my shin, winced. He pulled once and I went sprawling onto the porch, the rock tumbled from my hand toward a pile of garbage that lay in the sunniest corner.

  “There.” He stood on the steps, blocking my way back to the truck, and everything was still.

  “Christ.” I got my breath, rubbed my leg. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The other two were standing behind him in the yard, resigned to whatever Donny wanted from me.

  “Fix it.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the cabin door.

  I turned. Nothing looked broken, I had no idea what he was asking me to do. I stood. No one moved. The frame was old but steady, the door solid, the hinges clean.

  I stood, reached to test the doorknob.

  With no warning a shock so hot it seemed electric stunned my hand; I stumbled backward. Donny caught me, kept me upright.

  “It’s sealed,” he said again. “Us boys can get in and out, but it ain’t comfortable. Happened before when we was little, we just went out the window. We can’t figure why Truvy did it this time, and since she ain’t here …” He didn’t finish.

  I looked at the doorway again, trying to focus, find a bare wire or anything that would explain the buzzing pain in my hand.

  “You mean,” I said, took a step closer to the dark door, “you think your sister put a sealing spell on your house.”

  “What did you think I mean?” He clearly felt I was an idiot. “Plus that’s how we know she ain’t dead: her binding spell’s still working. Otherwise, you know, we might have killed that Able Carter.”

  A sealing spell could put a field of energy around anything—a book, a shed, a whole house. Its intent was to keep out unwanted visitors. It took effort on the part of the sealer and usually wore off after time or if anything happened to the person who set the spell. I’d heard about such spells for twenty years, first from people like June and then in my research, but I’d certainly never experienced one.

  I took a step forward, raised my hand slowly to the door. My fingers tingled, burned the second I reached for the frame.

  I turned. The brothers were gathered behind me on the porch, watching me. I couldn’t help but grin, astonished as I was at the phenomenon.

  “It feels like an electric current,” I said, aware of the wonder in my voice, “or a hot blade.”

  “We feel it.” Donny said plainly. “Tried to drag a pig in last night, after we saw you? Damn thing near did a flip in the door and landed on Dixon’s foot. Would not come in the house for love nor money.”

  Dixon held out the foot to show me.

  “Let me think,” I said slowly, turning back to the door.

  I stood for ten minutes or more, shifting weight from one leg to the other, examining every molecule of the frame before my eye caught an upward drift of dust from the bottom of the doorsill. A puff of gray, nothing more, distracted my eye; dust motes shot upward like a rocket. I got down on my hands and knees, still a good six inches back from the door, examined the paper-thin crack between the porch floor and the doorjamb. A razor of burning air was blasting up through it with a near constant intensity. I stood.

  “Excuse me.” I muscled through the trio, jumped the steps to the ground, crawled up under the porch.

  The boys were behind me again, this time bent over and peering in after me, still silent.

  Jagged rocks directly under the door, most the size of a crouching man, were arranged in a careful, thought-out pattern. There wasn’t quite enough light under the porch to see clearly. The dirt was wet; the boards were dripping but thankfully free of spiderwebs, other creatures. I inched as close to the pile of rocks as I could. I felt the heat. I touched one of the rocks, pulled my hand back. It was scalding. The pile was arranged, as far as I could tell, around a small hole in the ground to direct a furnace blast of heat in a thin sheet upward through the crack in the baseboard of the door frame. The crack further defined the stream of burning air. I slithered back out from under the porch, got to my feet, brushed myself off.

  “Boys,” I said quietly, “you know there’s a hole under your porch.”

  They all looked past me, bending, and stared into the darkness there.

  “That pile of rocks is around it.”

  They straightened.

  Donny grinned. “We don’t usually go crawling up under the house, Dr. Devilin.”

  The other two snorted.

  “But your sister does.”

  That shut them up.

  “She did seal the house,” I agreed, “after a fashion.”

  They glared, unblinking.

  “Didn’t your sister find wells once, water on your property?”

  “Uh-huh,” Donny said slowly. “Good while back; she was little bitty.”

  “And several of them were dry, or you didn’t find water in them, I mean.”

  “That’s right.” Donny folded his arms. “How’d you know that?”

  “One of the dry holes you dug was close to the house,” I went on, “and recently Truevine asked you to make a tunnel. Is that true?”

  They looked at one another. Dixon took a barely perceptible step back.

  “No,” Donny said slowly. “But a good time ago Momma asked us to do something like that. How you come to know a thing like that?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  “She didn’t say what it was for,” Dover whispered. “Was it the house-sealing spell?”

  “It was,” I confirmed. “One of the wells you dug hit on a geothermal pocket. It’s unusual but not unheard of. Truevine remembered that and used it, arranged the rocks.”

  Not twenty miles to our west there was a hot springs in the side of a mountain roughly the size of ours, a moneymaking tourist attraction.

  “What is it?” Dover asked, still nearly inaudible.

  “Very hot air or steam trapped in the earth, under the mountain.” I glanced at the door. “Your sister figured out how to direct it to your house. She’s a genius, you know. Do you realize how impressive this is? I had no idea she was capable …” I trailed off, s
haking my head.

  “Our sister,” Donny told me in no uncertain terms, “is the best person there is.”

  “So you understand that she’s arranged those rocks down there to send a blast of hot air up to your door.”

  “If that’s the spell,” Donny said calmly, “then I understand.”

  I had in my head about a half hour’s worth of explanation, and then I heard the voice of my old teacher, now discredited, also dead, Dr. Bishop. He turned out to be a less than perfect human being, but that didn’t mean all his ideas were wrong. Ideas can be perfect even when their inventors are not.

  “Folk explanation of any phenomenon,” he had told me a hundred times, “creates its own phenomenological dasein, a gestalt that supports itself. Who are you to say a scientific explanation is better, especially in the folk context? A woman says rubbing sage on her pillow keeps a ghost from waking her at midnight. You say it makes her believe she’s safe, so she sleeps better. The result is the same. Let the explanation be a part of phenomenon. Let the observer be a part of the observation. Don’t obscure the phenomenon with what you perceive to be the facts.”

  I nodded to Donny. “That’s the spell. If you want to keep it up, leave the stones alone. If you want it to stop, move the stones.”

  All three heads turned as one once again in the direction of the dark underside of the porch.

  “If Truvy’s done all that work,” Dixon announced firmly, “I still say we leave it be.”

  “I thought you wanted me to fix it,” I said, exasperated.

  “Dixon been saying Tru put it there for a reason,” Dover said. “If she went to all the trouble to crawl up under the house, I reckon we ought to respect that.”

  Everyone had calmed. I surmised that the boys had really only needed outside confirmation of their sister’s work. Fixing the situation had not been, after all, what they’d wanted. There are occasions upon which faith must be confirmed by the facts.

  “All right, then,” I said, sitting on the first step of the porch, “let’s move on. I want to find your sister almost as much as you do. Also, I promised Girlinda Needle I’d find Able, and I think he’s with Truevine. I’d like to find him alive. If you all keep catching him and stringing him up, that makes my job a whole lot harder.”

  They pondered.

  “Ms. Needle’s a good woman,” Donny allowed. “But her brother.” He shook his head.

  Time for psychology.

  “Would you like any man who was interested in your sister?” I asked. “Honestly.”

  I gave it a moment to sink in. Puzzled faces contorted.

  “What if I liked her?” I went on.

  They tensed.

  “You got a good woman, Doc,” Donny said, clench-jawed. “You ought to get married to that’un.”

  “My point is: you don’t think any man would be good enough for your sister.” I leaned back. “And from what I know about her, you might be right. But she’s got to find her own way. She falls in love, you have to let her. She wants a husband and children, that’s her business. If you chase off every man who comes around, by and by she’ll stop trying. What then?”

  Donny started to speak three times, stopping each time before words would come out. Finally he managed, “Where is she, Dr. Devilin? Where’s our sister?”

  “My theory,” I answered, “is that she and Carter are hiding out in the old cemetery. But you probably scared them off last night.”

  “You think she’s up there,” Dover rasped, “in that boneyard?”

  “That don’t make sense,” Donny agreed. “Why don’t she just come on home?”

  “I think she had something to do with your cousin’s death. She’s afraid.”

  “Harding?” Dover could barely say it.

  “That moron.” Donny shook his head. “I know he’s family, but he’s as worthless as a teat on a tree.”

  “Not to speak ill of the dead,” Dover said quickly.

  Doing so could merit a visit from them. Deceased spirits are quite irritable, especially immediately after their death, prone to visit anyone who doesn’t speak glowingly of them.

  “She didn’t have nothing to do with that,” Donny said after a moment, “and even if she did she’d still come home.”

  “Unless she was worried about bringing the police to you,” I returned. “I’m not interested in your nefarious activities, but I know you’ve run afoul of Deputy Needle, and now that he’s running for sheriff, he’s apt to be even more stern about the appearance of illegality. Especially since you nearly hung his brother-in-law.”

  “He can be a stickler,” Donny admitted. “So Tru is staying away to keep the police off us.”

  “Just an idea,” I admitted.

  “All right,” Donny said strongly, “I get it. You came up here to make a point, Doctor. You want us to help you find Able and Truvy. You think you’re a whole lot smarter than us, and you are in a lots of ways, but we know things you never heard of.”

  “I agree,” I answered, brushing the dirt from my pants. “That’s why we’d make the perfect team. Between us, we know everything.”

  I grinned, hoping it would put my proposition over.

  They exchanged silent communications.

  “Okay then,” Donny said finally, “you’d best come on in the house, if you think you can get past the spell, have you a sit-down. We got some information about Harding you need to know.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “I believe we might know why he was killed.” He took the steps.

  The kitchen was a sty, smelled worse than a slaughterhouse. Despite the jolt of extreme discomfort crossing the threshold, I made it in, along with hundreds of flies who seemed perfectly at home. Blessed shadows obscured the details of what lay on the dining table, but the word entrails was on my mind.

  There was one large room in the cabin, and a ladder that rose to a sleeping loft. The downstairs room boasted the huge table, a kitchen, a sitting area, and a stone fireplace. The ceiling was hung with dozens of dried spices, long twigs of rosemary tied together, thick braids of garlic, bundles of thyme, cress, hyssop, sage, lavender. They battled valiantly but lost the war of smells.

  “You boys made a mess in pretty quick order,” I observed, trying not to inhale. “This looks like a week’s work. Did you kill a hog in here?”

  They looked at one another accusingly.

  “Dixon said not to open any windows,” Donny tried to explain, “might break the seal.”

  “I won’t be able to take this for long,” I confessed, hand over nose and mouth.

  Dixon sighed, began gathering hog limbs and jowls, scooping them off the table into his arms, clutching them to his chest. Flies gathered about him. He shook his head once in my direction and exited through the front door. Dover followed behind with what seemed to be a collection of fish spines. Donny opened the window in the kitchen area.

  “Not so bad over here,” he invited.

  All things being relative, he was right, but I still found it difficult to breathe. As the sweet air from the side of the house poured in, I leaned and closed my eyes.

  Behind me Donny said, “Dr. Devilin, I want you to understand a few things. You went to college; I didn’t. You read books; I don’t. You think one way; I do another. In the realm of God’s world it’s all equal, I believe.” He leaned against the counter next to the sink, inches from me. “My point is: I want you to understand that I read some parts of this world the way you read a book. I know the alphabets of the air and the leaves. My sister is better at it than I am; otherwise I’m the best there is. Now, I realize you don’t have no idea what I’m saying, but you need to know I’m a whole lots more observant than you might give me credit for. That’s my say. I’m going to make some coffee. You need some?”

  “Coffee’s good,” I managed.

  He wasn’t menacing in the way he’d been before, but I still felt threatened, maybe by his proximity, maybe the strangeness of what he was trying to say. I k
new he wasn’t a stupid man, that what he was saying about our different kinds of knowledge was true. There are kinds of education that don’t take place in a university. He put a kettle on the stove.

  “I wonder if we could stick to finding your sister,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to do!” He pounded the edge of the sink with such force it rattled the dishes sitting in it and sent me scrambling backward. “You don’t see the circle in the wheel. You don’t see the way things are. You’re making a mistake and it’s a mistake that’s been made before, with dire consequences.”

  Dire consequences seemed a bizarre phrase coming from his mouth. I felt dizzy from the stench and disoriented by the darkness of the house and the sound of Donny’s voice.

  The kettle’s whistle startled me. He reached up to the cabinets beside him and got an old press coffeemaker. He dug into a ceramic pot next to the sink and pulled out a handful of black whole coffee beans. He put them in a pestle, ground them by hand, then dumped them into the bottom of the coffeepot, poured the hot water on top, put the lid in place. The sounds of the day picked up, and a rush of autumn air flushed the kitchen area.

  “I love my sister and I need for her to be happy. I don’t want that to happen to her, what you said about her giving up on marriage. We need to leave her be. She was right about you: you’re a good man. Reckon that’s why she told us to look after you.”

  Truevine told them to watch over me, I thought. That’s why they let me go last night. Remember to thank her when I see her.

  “Okay, Donny,” I said calmly. “What’s this about knowing why Harding was murdered?”

  He cast his eye about the cabin. “Quite a smell in here, ain’t it?”

  “I can barely stand it.”

  “Smells like a slaughterhouse,” he agreed. He took out blue coffee mugs, poured the contents of the pot through a sieve, and handed me one. “Or a mortuary.”

  “No,” I corrected him, sipping, “mortuaries don’t smell like this; they smell of formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol—”

  “That’s right,” he interrupted, avoiding my eyes, “if the bodies have been taken care of proper. Of course, if they ain’t been treated right, like if a mortician don’t do his job …” He wanted me to finish his thought.