The Witch's Grave: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  “I never wanted to think about that, but there’s a larger problem for me.” He leaned. “Everyone in your town has a bizarre fascination with death. They talk about it at church; they laugh when they see it; they have covered dish dinners and raffle drawings at funerals. Those drunken boys, ones that found the body? They’re prime citizens of your little Creepy Junction. What’s the matter with you-all? Why can’t you just put the dead in the ground and forget about them like decent people?”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Necrophilia is like the town hobby.” He set his cup down, nodded once.

  “Death is comforting.” I stood.

  “No. There’s nothing remotely reassuring about it.” He watched me move to the counter.

  “Everything dies. When you do, your tribulations will be at an end. That’s a comfort.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?” He held out his cup.

  “A belief in the solace of death is essential to an agrarian culture,” I told him, taking the cup out of his hand.

  “This is hardly an agrarian culture,” he stammered. “Shops and gas stations and the tourism industry hold this berg together. And businessmen would rather talk about anything than death.”

  “All right, don’t come with me, then,” I said flatly.

  The espresso machine sent white vapor upward. It curled around the sun slanting into the kitchen, as if it were avoiding the light.

  Skidmore was understandably concerned about letting a murder suspect out of jail to meet with a witch in a cemetery on Halloween. He trusted me, but if word got out that I was tromping around the graveyard with his prisoner, the election campaign would surely suffer. It was the sort of thing that would give his adviser, Tommy Tineeta, an aneurysm. The plan was to avoid mentioning anything about the tryst I had in mind. To anyone.

  Which is why I wanted Andrews with us. Without meaning to, he was quite capable of leaking information, or flooding same if alcohol were involved. I didn’t want him wandering down to Gil’s, for example, sipping lightning, musing about our adventures to total strangers. Not only would it make things more difficult for Skidmore, but it could jeopardize the invisible community I had promised to protect.

  I called down from my bedroom, pulling on a fresh pair of black jeans. My appeal was to his sense of literature.

  “Think what a perfect Poe moment you could have.”

  “No,” he countered from downstairs, “it would have to be after dark to be ideal, and you’re getting dressed now. It’s barely after noon.”

  “It’ll take a while to get Able out of lockup and up to the graveyard.”

  “Two in the afternoon is not midnight. It ought to be around midnight.”

  “How about a chance to challenge May?” I appeared to him at the top of the stairs. “Test her language skills.”

  “What possible thrill could I find in that?” He had planted himself on the sofa, reclining, tousled head on pillow, eyes closed.

  “Are you going to sleep?” I couldn’t believe it. I bounded down the stairs, a deliberate clatter. “You’ve just slept twelve hours.”

  “Ten.”

  “What kind of host would I be,” I said shifting approaches, “to leave you alone and palely loitering while I have all the fun?”

  “‘Palely loitering’?”

  “Isn’t that Shakespeare?”

  “Not by a long shot. It might be Keats or Shelley, some belle dame sans merci sounding crap, I think,” he told me drolly, “but it’s hardly Shakespeare.”

  “Are you sure?” I knew it wasn’t. I sat on the arm of the sofa.

  “Look,” he said, sitting up. “You stick to your five-thousand-year-old boring stories, how would that be? Leave genius of the ages to me.”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ‘’Tis now the very witching time of night.’”

  “Yeah,” he shot back, standing, “Hamlet’s a big one for the supernatural, but you should have gone with the Scottish play for witches.”

  “Aha!” I leapt to my feet.

  “What?”

  “No other group on earth is as superstitious as theatre people.” I grinned. “You couldn’t bring yourself to utter the name of the play even in my house. The closest theatre you could curse by saying it out loud is seventy miles away at Young Harris College.”

  “Force of habit.” He avoided my eyes.

  “Uh-huh. Do you whistle in the dressing room? Do you ever say the words good luck?”

  “I avoid what makes actors nervous. They’re skittish enough as it is.”

  “Continuing the infantilization of an entire profession.” I turned and headed for the door.

  “You know, you could bite me right about now.” He followed.

  “‘The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl, and spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves.’”

  “All right, that’s a fairly obscure one for the likes of you,” he admitted, right behind me.

  “It’s Henry IV,” I said proudly.

  “Henry VI, part 2, actually,” he corrected, pleased.

  “Better put on some shoes and get your coat.”

  “What?” He stopped.

  We were on the porch steps. He seemed surprised; the conversation had carried him outside without his realizing it.

  “It’ll get cold later,” I said, not looking back. “We may be out awhile.”

  “Oh, right,” he said absently, ducking back into the house. “How on earth do you know that Henry quote?”

  His shoes were by the door, coat on the hook above them.

  “‘Graves have yawned,’” I went on, opening the truck, “‘and yielded up their dead, and ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.’”

  “Stop it!” He appeared again in the doorway, pulling on my old overcoat.

  “Julius Caesar. There’s more.”

  “No,” he ordered. “Should I lock the door?”

  “Pull it to; it’s all right.”

  I started the engine; he hurried to the passenger side.

  “‘Vex not a ghost.’” I added Vincent Price to my voice. “‘He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.’”

  “Lear,” he said, but his voice was softer.

  “What?” I heard something in his tone.

  “How much does that last quote apply to Rudyard Pinhurst? There’s a man stretched out on the rack of the world if ever there was one.”

  “He’s not the ghost,” I reminded Andrews.

  “Really?” He settled in his seat, slammed the door. “‘Were I the ghost that walked, I’d bid you mark her eye, and the words that followed should be “Remember mine.” ’ Winter’s Tale. He’s the most haunted man I’ve ever met, obviously still in love with Truevine. Guilt’s a ghost that torments everyone, but him more than most.”

  “Is that Shakespeare too, that last part?”

  “No,” he said, smiling. “that’s me.”

  “It’s good.” I pulled the car onto the dirt road. “True.”

  We drove awhile in silence. All the leaves were gone from the trees; the sky above us was shredded by naked limbs, threatened rain.

  “You think Rud is more haunted than I am?” I said when we were down from the mountain and turning onto the paved road.

  “God, no,” he said instantly. “I meant more haunted than any normal man. You’re way off the scale. Category of your own.”

  “Good.” I rolled my head a little to pop my neck. “Wanted to keep my title intact.”

  “You know you didn’t trick me into coming with you,” he said, watching long rows of stacked corn sheaves out his window.

  “I know,” I agreed. “You just wanted to appear reticent. Keep the Cool Crown.”

  “You have your reputation to maintain,” he said, settling into his seat. “I have mine.”

  Getting Able out of jail was a breeze.

  “I reckon I’
ll take the prisoner home with me for lunch,” Skidmore told the other deputies, yawning, “so you’uns can get yourself a bite, not have to worry over him. Plus, let him see his sister.”

  His coworkers agreed it was generous of Deputy Needle. They all liked him, backed his election bid for sheriff. No one had cared for Sheriff Maddox, whose funeral had been a lonely affair. Skid was the man for the job.

  The others checked out. Andrews and I sat mute. Skid watched his fellows leave, remained seated quietly for two or three minutes after they were gone.

  “Strictly speaking,” he said slowly, “what we’re about to do is not legal.”

  “Couldn’t you say the prisoner has vital information about the crime scene,” Andrews began, “and you have to take him there to confront the … something?”

  “Yeah.” Skid nodded. “You see a lot of that on the television. But the caretaker’s cabin at the cemetery is hardly the crime scene. The idea behind incarceration, as I understand it, is to keep the criminal from getting out. By and by if I keep letting criminals loose, I could get a slack reputation.”

  “Whereas telling your colleagues that you want to take the prisoner home for a visit with his sister and a home-cooked meal …” Andrews trailed off.

  “Is something folks around here could understand,” Skid returned pointedly. “Whereas if I tell anyone that I’m taking said prisoner to the boneyard for a visit with a girl who thinks she’s dead, there ain’t that many who would understand. You see the difference.”

  “I do,” said Andrews contritely. “One’s Mayberry; one’s Addams Family.”

  Skid turned a jaundiced eye my way. “How does he know all this old American TV?”

  “There’s some cable station that shows the things over and over again,” I sighed. “He’s addicted.”

  “Okay.” Skidmore stood. “Let’s go.”

  He headed to the cells.

  Skidmore’s squad car lead the way, Able in back. Andrews and I followed in my truck. We’d explained the idea to Able three times, but he still wasn’t sure what we were doing. In the end the notion that he could see Truevine for himself, confirm she wasn’t dead, was the thing that most convinced him to go.

  “Able certainly did have trouble following our conversation,” Andrews mused, watching the squad car ahead of us.

  “Maybe being locked up and accused of murder is distracting him.” I tried not to ride Skid’s bumper, but he was driving more slowly than I wanted to.

  “Little thing like that,” Andrews said. “I guess it would bother some. So your grand scheme here is to get the lovers to confront one another, thus jolting Truevine back to reality, easing Able’s mind …”

  “ … and getting to the bottom of the murder,” I finished. “Wouldn’t it be nice to solve that, make sure I’m right?”

  “Oh, that. So things can return to normal here in Pleasantdale.” Andrews cracked his window a little. “This smell—old leaves, cut hay, whatever else it is—it’s incredibly … evocative.” His voice softened. “I don’t often think of home, you know. But when I was a kid, nearly every autumn Dad would take us all to a fall carnival in the town where he was raised.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Don’t reach for your tape recorder; it wasn’t anything special. Cheap rides, crass booths, candy apples—but there was a haunted house that was something. Old school. Witches and ghosts; someone would tell you grapes in a bowl were eyeballs, make you stick your fingers in it, that sort of thing. Terrific.” He rolled down the window a little bit more. “Smelled just like this.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Same.” He sniffed the air. “I don’t think he’ll leave the hospital.”

  “When are you going home?”

  He pulled on his earlobe, a perennial unconscious gesture when he was distracted. “Probably not until his funeral.”

  I wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t go home sooner, speak with his father before it was too late. The thought set me thinking about my own father, our tangled relationship. Clouds were rolling in. The day grew darker quickly as we turned off the highway and up the mountain.

  My parents were itinerant entertainers, carnival performers. Father was a prestidigitator of some merit. My mother was his lovely assistant, whose moral fiber wove a unique cloth, a cloak she wore to disguise her true self. Theirs was a match made in another reality, one where fidelity, concern, parental responsibility all were unknown, unused qualities. My father’s death was a curiosity to most. My mother’s funeral was lonelier than Sheriff Maddox’s bleak ceremony.

  Since my parents’ touring enterprise, The Ten Show, had been the concoction of Tristan, the self-named Newcomb Dwarf, I’d met him several times when I was young. He had died and left the show to my parents by the time I was in grade school.

  Tristan Newcomb had once tried out for the St. Louis Browns. His father, Tubby, had refused to allow him onto a church little league team in Chattanooga when he was ten, embarrassed by his size. Tristan practiced every day in private and became the best ballplayer in Tennessee by the time he was in high school. When he graduated he took a bus to St. Louis, hoping to replace Eddie Gaedel, the renowned three-foot, seven-inch specialty hitter. Gaedel had made all the papers when he was walked in a game against the Detroit Tigers in 1951. Gaedel died in 1961. Tristan, who claimed to have Eddie “beat by an inch,” thought to replace him. But management explained that Eddie’s contract had been a joke, a freakish entertainment. They weren’t really looking for short players.

  Tristan left St. Louis that night, came back to Blue Mountain, the town that had exiled his father. He started the strangest traveling show in American history, as far as I know, something so far removed from Andrews’s gentle English country fair that it was difficult to believe they had both existed on the same planet.

  Without meaning to, a father influences a son. A son does things to prove himself to the father, even a distant one, a demented one—even one who’s dead.

  So I did not ask Andrews about his decision to stay in America while his father died in Manchester. Instead I slowed my truck and kept a safe ten feet behind the police car all the way up the mountain.

  “I haven’t told you about my visit to the Deveroe place,” I said to Andrews as we pulled up to the cemetery entrance.

  “Something happen?”

  I told him about Truevine’s “house seal” and my opinion of it, as well as the strange feeling I got from Donny.

  “She’s really shaping up to be my kind of girl,” Andrews sighed. “Weird beyond all recognition and a secret genius.”

  “Keep an eye out, would you,” I said to him as we turned onto the rough roadway into the place. “You never know what you might glimpse.”

  “Skidmore can be closemouthed,” Andrews said, his eyes scanning the yard, “but weren’t you a little surprised that he knew Pinhurst was the caretaker up here?”

  “A little.”

  “And don’t you think Skid knows about the vagrants?” he went on, lowering his voice.

  “Seems he would, doesn’t it.” I shifted down to first; the police car crept along in front of us.

  The caretaker’s cabin came into view as we topped a small ridge. It was beginning to rain; translucent blue lines blurred everything.

  Rud was sitting on the porch, shotgun in his hands.

  The squad car came to a stop. Nothing moved for a moment.

  Rud stood up slowly, barrel of the gun pointed at the floor of the porch. He held up his right hand for an instant, gave one short wave.

  Skid said something to Able; then the deputy got out of his car; Andrews and I followed suit.

  “You’ve got a gun,” Skid said plainly.

  “Had trouble last night,” Rud answered, “after Dr. Devilin left. I believe it was the Deveroe brothers.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Able twist around, searching the perimeter for any sign of his tormentors.

  “We’re here on official b
usiness,” Skid continued. “There was a murder last Thursday night up by Dr. Devilin’s house. It appears to have involved Able Carter, who is in the back of my vehicle.”

  Rud nodded without looking at the car.

  “He’s a suspect. We believe the other person involved is Truevine Deveroe.” Skid’s plodding diction seemed more out of bad television than his own mind. “I have reason to believe she’s here on this property. I’d like to find her and take her in for questioning.” Skid looked at the ground for a moment. “I don’t have a warrant. It’s just questioning.”

  Rud shifted his weight onto one leg. “Did you write that down and rehearse it?”

  “No,” Skid grinned, his face relieved, “but I’ve been studying on it all the way up here. How’d I do?”

  “Very official.” Rud’s stone face showed no hint of humor. “I’ll try to get it just like that if Uncle Jackson asks me about it.”

  “When is the word,” Skid assured him. “Not if.”

  “Okay,” Rud said impatiently. “Can we go now?”

  “Sure.” Skid looked back at the car. “Able, you ready?”

  “Ask him did he chase off the Deveroes.”

  “I’ve never seen them here in the daylight,” Rud answered. “Never once.” He held up his firearm. “I’ve got a gun.”

  “Gun?” Able squirmed in the seat, his voice barely audible through the unopened car window. “You seen them boys recently? You better take a cannon.”

  “Able,” Skid said, opening the door, “I understand being nervous about them after what happened—”

  “You don’t understand dick,” he interrupted. “I was hanging by my neck from a tree!”

  I kept my eye on Rud. He didn’t show the least surprise at Able’s statement. Despite Rud’s ability to mask his inner self, I got the impression that the incident was not news to him. As it happened so close to his kingdom, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d seen it.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Skid said, holding the door. “I meant that I see why you’d be nervous under the circumstances. I’m telling you I won’t let anything happen.”