“A mortician.” I set the mug down. “Harding was killed because of something he did wrong at his funeral home.”
Seven
The Deveroe boys were reluctant to let me leave. They wanted me to stay, find their sister. A few minutes of arguing and a well-chosen phrase about law enforcement convinced them I had to go. I needed to clear my head, rid my memory of the stench of their place, collect my thoughts.
I was pretty sure Andrews hadn’t left the house. If I hurried, I’d be able to catch him before he ran off with Skidmore on their secret mission.
I pulled away from the witch’s cabin, sped home as quickly as I could.
When I got there, Andrews’s car was gone. I switched off the truck, sat in silence a moment, trying to imagine where he’d gone, what he and Skidmore were doing. Without me.
I reached for pad and pencil in the glove compartment, made random notes:
Able Carter discovered something about Harding’s mortuary. That’s what they were arguing about the night Harding was murdered. Why was the body naked? Visit the mortuary today. Truevine and Able won’t come home because Able killed Harding, Truevine’s hiding him. Where are they now? Why were they in the graveyard? Find out more about Truevine; is she the key element?
I felt I was writing from pure instinct, one of the tools I had used for years investigating folk material. These collection talents were the exact techniques required for solving Harding’s murder. Folklorists are detectives. Dr. Bishop once told me, when I was frustrated by university politics, that I should never try to acquire new skills for new tasks if I could apply old talents I already possessed. “Fix academic problems in the department the way you would collect a folktale or song. Use those abilities you already have; make them metaphorical; translate.” Genius. I knew I could only solve the murder the way I would ordinarily investigate a folk phenomenon.
I stared at the empty house. Our day had ripened nicely, though the air was slightly chilled. Sun the color of snow glazed the roof, made me squint. What were Andrews and Skidmore up to? I climbed out of the car, deciding not to let their little play distract me from larger questions. What attributes did Andrews have to contribute to my work after all? A Shakespeare scholar’s perspective: decidedly useless. Best to operate alone. I always had.
The problem, and I knew it, was that my mind could run from ignorance to paranoia with lightning speed. Skid and Andrews were working together. They were plotting. They were doing something behind my back. They were working against me. They were deliberately trying to subvert me. Not just me, my entire way of life. That’s the path my thinking could take without the slightest provocation, that fast.
I felt an itch on my leg. Surely it was a hive. A hive would grow to cover my leg. My leg would swell and become useless. I wouldn’t be able to walk. The hives would get into my throat. My throat would close up. I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Because of my swollen leg I’d never make it to the truck, couldn’t drive to the emergency room. I would die on the front steps, as far as I could crawl before my esophagus closed entirely.
That’s the way fear grows: from nothing to death in ten sentences. I’d taken that course of thinking a thousand times. The only way to avoid it was to concentrate on something else with such ferocity that everything was blocked out. For decades I’d used a fear of my own thinking process to focus my mind, the secret of my success in the field. Sometimes I had to use my mind to trick my mind, a dangerous Möbius path.
Onward, then. Go to the mortuary, see if I could discover what Donny was trying to tell me. On the way, stop by June’s house. Find out more about Truevine Deveroe, if she was to be my focus. I pulled the truck back onto the road.
The slant of sun was blinding down the mountain, and the black shade on the other side of it seemed night. The sky was endless above me; curling leaves in the wind sighed upward, last gasping of the old year. October’s story is always regret: the things May might have done. It’s a time for ghosts, my mother’s voice leaving, my father’s shallow breath—all the things I should already have told Lucinda.
As I pulled up to June and Hek’s home I promised myself, a prayer, to speak more honestly with Lucinda when she came home. Tell her secrets my father never told my mother, talk things out. If the sins of the father are visited upon the son, how much more is that son haunted by the father’s regrets?
I honked the horn getting out of the truck, then sang out.
“June!” Hello the house.
A gust of wind, the leaning of wheat in the field behind the barn, and, at last, her voice answered.
“Come on in, then.”
The creak of the screen door was a final announcement. I knew to head for the kitchen; I could smell the cornbread.
“This is a treat, seeing you two days so close,” she said before I was through the doorway.
“I’m here on business.”
“Of course.” She nodded. “Truevine.”
Even though I knew that news traveled fast in our town and had also long suspected June’s unacknowledged psychic abilities, I still managed to stumble over the threshold, surprised by her perception.
“Careful, boy,” she said, still stirring something on the stove.
She stood in her apron and dark dress, ancient shoes, in what little light the northern kitchen window allowed. Her hair was pulled back so tightly the skin at her temples pinched, but she had not put it in a bun, as was her usual style. A gray ponytail dangled at the back of her head, an oddly young afterthought to the gently aged face.
“New hairstyle?” I took a seat at the kitchen table.
“I got up quick today.” Her words were uncharacteristically clipped.
“Well, the truth is,” I confessed, “I am looking for something more about Truevine. I don’t know what, though.”
Leave it open. Suggest, then be silent. The open-ended query is a bigger net than any specific question.
She stopped stirring. “You know I don’t like to gossip.”
“That’s right.” My eyes shot downward.
She took a seat at the table. “You don’t want no coffee.”
I shook my head.
“Truevine’s real power took a hold when her parents passed. She needed something, and that’s what she got. Some of these so-called churchgoers call it devil’s work, but there’s nothing wrong with the way that girl does, and I don’t care who knows it.”
“You don’t care who knows you feel that way,” I clarified.
“Right. Some call her bad names. I don’t. We used to have several of these women back when I was young, and we depended on them many a time for having babies, curing livestock, helping out one way or another.” She folded her hands in front of her and wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Truevine’s a good witch,” I goaded.
“Don’t call her that,” she shot back. Then she slumped. “You don’t know.”
“I’d like to.”
“No.” She licked her lips. “You wouldn’t.”
Typical of June, of most of my friends in Blue Mountain. Suggest something mammoth, then demur in the telling. Maddening.
“Well, she put a sealing spell on her cabin before she disappeared,” I began.
“Hogwash,” June spat. “No such of a thing. Her charm is for animals.”
There it was, the first hint.
“Animals?” I tried to make it sound as innocent as possible.
June sighed a familiar sound, the one she made after she had successfully convinced herself that I had dragged the story out of her. She wasn’t gossiping, the sigh said. I’d forced her to tell.
“You don’t know about the wild dog?”
“No.” Careful. Too many words would scare away the story.
“I guess it was when you were at the university.” She sat back and closed her eyes, the way she began the real tale. “They say she was in the wood up there by the graveyard, gathering evening primrose to set on her mother’s grave, when it come up on her. Bl
ack dog size of a calf. Growling. Hungry. You could see his ribs show. Truevine just smiled, fixed her eye on the dog. She says, ‘Are you hungry? I’ve got some spice cake and some dried fish I was to have for supper, and you’re more than welcome to it, if that’s to your liking.’ Dog nods once. She invited him to eat.”
Invited: a key point in the tradition.
“She took out all that was left of her food, laid it on her kerchief, spread like a table for a guest, put her flowers to the corner, stepped back. Dog nods his head again. Tru says, ‘There. God’s table, here in the woods.’ Which if that don’t prove she ain’t a witch I don’t know what. Dog nods his head the third time.”
“I see,” I said, smiling.
It had to be three times, too.
“They say,” she went on, “he ate very delicately for a wild animal. Then he turns around like a house dog and lays down right next to Tru.”
“She was lucky,” I said.
Wild dogs in the woods all over these mountains had attacked livestock, small children, sometimes grown hunters, often killed. They were not pets.
“No luck to it. Girl’s got a way. She says, ‘You like my company. Come on.’ They went all over the graveyard that day. After that the wild dog took up with her every time she went out in the woods by herself. Dog was never seen when she was with her brothers, but alone the dog always found her, kept her company.”
“They say.”
“They do. So one day she had to go over to Clinch Taylor’s dry goods store in Pine City. It’s a long walk, and she’d no longer set out than the dog took up with her.”
“That is a long walk,” I agreed. Fourteen miles over rough terrain, a two- or three-hour trek each way, even for a healthy young person.
“She likes that Owen Mill stone-ground flour they sell; she goes over there every now and again. Now you know how they are over in Pine City. Slothful, that’s my opinion. They always blame floods or bugs or bad luck, but they’re just plain lazy and no good, Pine City is. They’d had a poor harvest that year, I reckon, but the way some of these boys do, they said it wasn’t their own fault. They saw Truevine and dog come up over the hill, they commence to teasing her: ‘Witch girl. She got her a devil dog!’”
“Her reputation preceded her.” I sat back. “Now which boys were these?”
“Some that had to go to work in Clinch’s store because their crop failed. I believe they’d been drinking. They kept up teasing, said she was the cause of the bad harvest. They blamed her. Trouble was, others thereabout joined in, and teasing turned mean.”
“That can’t be good.”
“It was terrible,” June answered. “They started saying they were going to make her change her spell. She paid for her goods, left right quick, but they started after her.”
“How many?”
“Five or six. Drunk boys. She was scared; she ran, which made the boys mad. They chased her all the way to the Little Sancrow River—”
“Between here and there,” I interrupted. “It’s white water.”
“And it started to rain,” she agreed, “but those boys were right behind, so Tru and the dog jumped in. She might have drowned except the dog fetched her in his teeth to the other side.”
“Amazing.” I nodded, prompting.
“Wet to the bone,” she went on, her voice full of the power of the story, “no strength left, they cast themselves on the far bank. Those mean boys stood on the other side cursing and shouting how they’d get her still. Tru and the dog were too tuckered to move, and they might have been got, except that God didn’t want that. Lightning hit a tree right next to the dog, scared the boys silly. They left off, ran away. Ignorant.”
“But Tru was all right?” I asked.
June nodded. “She managed to drag several of those burning branches into the shelter of a covering rock near the riverbank. In very short order she and the dog was both warm as a summer day, dry as parson’s throat.”
“Nice phrase.” Evidence she’d told the story a dozen times or more to others.
“Now the last part is hard to swallow, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s good. They say that dog went back in the water and caught a fish. Tru cooked it there on the lightning fire, and even though it was most likely a trout, that fish was entirely free of bones.”
“The dog caught a fish that had no bones.”
She stood. “God delights in little miracles as well large.”
“The point is …” I coaxed.
“The point is that Truevine has a power over animals and sometimes she gets blamed for things which have got nothing to do with her.”
I watched her return to her pots on the stove. One was brimming with fresh field peas.
“She can survive in the woods better than most,” I said slowly. “She’s out there because she’s afraid someone will blame her for Harding’s death, something she didn’t do.”
“That college education don’t get in the way of your good sense. Much.” She was proud of me. “Right to this day you see that black dog up in the cemetery sometimes.”
“But that’s exactly what I think Able’s afraid of. Not the dog. I mean they’re both hiding because someone will blame them for Harding’s murder. I think they’re in the graveyard.”
“I wondered how long it would take you to get to that.” She stirred serenely. “Hek laid down enough hints.”
“Why didn’t you let me know that the last time I was here?” No point in telling her I’d already thought it.
“Not my business.” She exhibited the whisper of a smile. “You know your Great-grandfather Devilin from the old country, he was one of them to start that graveyard. Along with the Newcombs.”
I was well aware of June’s propensity for bending the truth if it made for a better story, for further crafting facts to fit ancient songs and tales. Her story about her husband’s adventures traveling from town to town looking for her after he was wounded in Vietnam was a nearly word-for-word parallel of the song “Dark-eyed Sailor”—and about a hundred other variants of the same plot. I knew it, she knew it, and still she insisted on embellishing reality. Truth, lies, and a human propensity for hyperbole weave the fabric of folklore—and life, I suppose.
“No. My great-grandfather is buried up there, but he had nothing to do with the graveyard.”
“Built part of it himself. Out of guilt for marrying a woman he didn’t love,” she went right on, as if the story of old Conner Devilin were recent news. June had heard my great-grandfather’s history a hundred times.
“What do you think you’re doing, Junie, bringing up that old trouble now?”
“Not my business,” she said, holding up one hand. “Get you a plate and I’ll let you have a taste of these peas.”
“I’m not hungry.” I stood. Changing the subject to food meant she was done talking about Truevine and nothing I could do would change that. “I might want to come back and talk to Hek about all this.”
“He don’t know a thing.”
“Still.”
“You miss Lucinda?”
“I do,” I said quietly, unsettled by her sudden change of subject.
“Tell her that when she gets back.” June stared out the window. “You don’t have much of woman’s ways in your life; you could use a little more. You know you ought to marry that girl.”
“I don’t know, June.” I pushed the chair in. “You’re aware of my feelings about being married in general, my parents’ disaster. I’m not sure I’m cut out for the institution.”
“That’s a laugh,” she responded without the hint of a smile. “You need marrying more than any man I ever knew.”
“I’ll be back later,” I sighed, exasperated.
She nodded. I left. No point in dredging up all the doubts I’d buried deep. They needed their rest.
The air had refused to warm, even though the sun was doing its best. A wind down the rocks of the mountain was ice water, the crack of cold apples. I was glad to climb into
the truck.
Harding Pinhurst the Third was killed, I thought driving downward, because he wasn’t doing his job at the mortuary. His work was shoddy, and someone found out. Families take death seriously here. That’s what Donny was telling me. I have to find out. How am I going to get into the building?
Pinhurst Funeral Parlor and Crematorium was an imposing pre-Victorian mansion on the edge of three hundred acres of protected land. The large acreage had been bought by the state during World War II and set aside to extend the Appalachian Trail park system, but work had never been completed. Ancient oaks and odd blue conifers surrounded the place, except for spots in front. Ivy did its duty over most of the front yard, decorating what it obscured.
The house itself, redesigned when Harding took over as director not five years earlier, sat off our town’s main road about a hundred yards. It stood three stories, white with ornate ginger trim, a wraparound front porch guarding it, tall slanting clay-tiled roof, a dozen gables covered. Oversize rockers sat empty on the porch. No driveway, the yard was always a wreck, cars parked everywhere with no pattern; grass didn’t stand a chance. The windows of the house were all beveled lead glass, wavy and clouded, like cataracts. Paint curled away from the wooden exterior like dry skin; the eaves sagged; the columns on the porch were canes supporting a hazardous overhang. Still, it was a grand old structure and in the right light was a set piece straight from Arsenic and Old Lace.
No cars. Good. No sign of anyone around. I pulled the truck to the side of the house. Behind the shelter of low branches it wouldn’t be seen by anyone driving by.
I hadn’t been there since Ida Shumps’s funeral six months before. The place was deserted. Steps creaked when I peered into the small window in the back door. I checked the lock. Solid. I tried the window next to it. No luck. I was cold in the shade; wind found the bare skin of my face and slapped it. I worked my way around the back of the house checking windows with no success. On the far side of the house I came across the root cellar. It had no lock.
The Witch's Grave: A Fever Devilin Mystery Page 10
