Widow Town

by Joe Hart

“How is your mother holding up,” Gray finally said.

  Davey shook his head. “She hasn’t come out of her room since last night, hasn’t eaten anything.”

  “Would you like me to talk with her?”

  “You can try.”

  Davey rose and Gray followed him into the house. It smelled like dust and old flowers inside. The sun fell on the wood floors in oblong shapes, motes dancing like things alive.

  “Their…her room is at the back through the kitchen.” Davey slumped into a chair that had one of Miles’s old work shirts hanging from its back.

  Gray moved through the house, his boots clicking on the floor. A hallway led off of the tidy kitchen and at its end was a closed door painted white. Sunshine burned in a line beneath its edge. He knocked once and waited for a response. When none came he leaned his head toward the door.

  “Renna? It’s Mac, can I come in?”

  Silence.

  “I just want to talk to you for a minute, then I’ll go.” He looked over his shoulder through the house to where Davey sat and lowered his voice. “Renna, I know this is hard, but there’s a young man out here that’s depending on you. You’re all he has left.”

  Something creaked in the room and he waited. When the knob remained motionless he grasped it and turned, hoping it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t. He pushed the door open a few inches and started to look inside when it bumped into something. He shoved on the handle and the door moved with resistance and he was able to squeeze through the opening.

  Renna hung from a hook in the ceiling, a wide leather belt cinched tight around her neck.

  Gray let out a groan as the corpse spun, Renna’s bloodshot eyes, glazed and bulging. Her tongue, ashen and swollen, hung from the side of her mouth. The chair she’d stood on lay on its side beneath her dangling feet and her shadow pirouetted on the wall.

  Footsteps came down the hall and he pushed the door fully closed.

  “Don’t come in here, son.” He looked up at the hanging woman and then squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t come in.”

  Chapter 33

  The morning sunlight slanted into Gray’s office and made his eyes sting.

  He rubbed his face, the unshaven whiskers scratching against his palm. He poured his third cup of coffee and sipped at the lukewarm brew before returning to the article he’d been reading. Someone approached his office and when he looked up, Ruthers stood in the doorway.

  “Morning, Sheriff.”

  “Morning, Joseph.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Why thank you. With a silver tongue like that I can see why Siri agreed to date you.”

  Ruthers laughed and sat in the chair across the desk. “Sorry.”

  “Didn’t get much sleep.”

  “What time did everything finally get taken care of last night?”

  “Around eleven. Davey’s nearest relatives are Miles’s second cousins that live in Wisconsin. They arrived near dark and agreed to stay with him until everything was settled. Not that I know the meaning of the word anymore.”

  “What a thing, to lose your father and mother in the same week.”

  “The boy’s strong but I had a word with one of the cousins to keep a close watch on him. Grief’s a powerful drug, never know what he might do.”

  “When are the funerals?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?”

  “Yep. Both Miles and Renna wanted to be cremated and since everything was cut and dried as far as Renna’s death went, Davey decided he wanted them both taken care of on the same day. Can’t say I blame him. Who the hell wants to go through that twice if you don’t have to?”

  Ruthers shook his head and took off his hat. “It’s like madness, isn’t it? Like a stone rolling down a hill that just gets bigger and bigger as it goes.”

  “That seems to be an appropriate analogy, Joseph,” Gray said, turning to look out the window. “You ever heard of Apollo Silva?”

  “No sir.”

  “He was the last psychopath on record in the country, never had the Line. He was apprehended in 2074 on a tip given to the local authorities from a next-door neighbor of his. She was an older woman who was at home a lot and from what I can gather, a bit nosy. She saw Silva coming and going at odd hours of the night and always noticed his garbage smelled worse than anyone’s on their street. Turns out Silva was abducting women both young and old, he’d taken five that they eventually linked him to. He was divorced and his first victim was his ex-wife who’d moved three states away. He’d taken her from her home and driven back to his house before tying her up to their old bed. He then proceeded to roast her feet and legs with a butane torch and eat them while she was still alive. He did this to all of his victims and when they eventually perished from blood loss and sheer trauma, he’d dissect them and put the pieces in the trash bin in front of his home. He did it for two years before the old lady living next to him called in his suspicious behavior.”

  “My God, Sheriff. That’s about the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’ll agree there. But what raised the hair on my neck is that no one knew he was doing it. Not his boss, not his extended family, and definitely not the investigators that were working on the cases. No one could see him for the monster he was.”

  Gray fell silent and they sat not speaking until the intercom clicked and Mary Jo’s voice came through the speaker, startling them both. “Sheriff?”

  “Yes?”

  “I just received a call from a Sam Griner up near Emberton.”

  “Okay?”

  “He owns a Churner and was contracted to work a field for a new landowner. Well he went and started working this morning and he found something he thought we should take a look at.”

  “What is it, Mary Jo?”

  “He said he dug up a bunch of bones.”

  ~

  Gray guided the cruiser beneath a towering oak and found the overgrown access road shooting off from the highway. Two enormous ruts were carved into the land and he drove in between them, taking in the surroundings. Fields of browning clover and alfalfa spanned the horizon and beyond without a single house in sight. A row of trees lined the edge of the dying grassland. The sky was an ocean of blue above without any skiffs of cloud to mar its surface. The trail curved and traveled over a hill. The remains of a homestead scrolled by on the right, the house’s carcass sunken and blackened, time’s mouthfuls taken from the collapsing roof and missing siding. What might have been a barn lay flat with broken boards sticking up like teeth from the ground. They drove on for another mile before the hulking machine came into view that had made the tracks they followed.

  The Churner was a hill of steel. Its boxy sides rose forty feet in the air where a glass cab perched in the center of the mass. Iron wheels covered by tracks a foot thick stood almost a story high. Its gouging blade was retracted from beneath its bulk and soared above everything like a shining castle wall. The soil behind the machine was the color of old blood, uneven and broken in a swath the width of the implement. A middle-aged man wearing jeans and a blue work-shirt stained with sweat at the armpits and neck, was climbing down the Churner’s side ladder. Gray stopped the cruiser a dozen yards from the machine and shut it off.

  “Quite a location for a graveyard.” Ruthers said from the passenger seat.

  “That it is.”

  They climbed out of the car and strode through the heat to the Churner just as the man stepped from the ladder to the ground.

  “Sam?” Gray asked.

  “That’s me,” the man said putting out a hand for each of them to shake. He had dark hair flecked with gray and a wide, tanned face. “Appreciate you coming out so fast, it’s a little drive up from your neck of the woods.”

  “No problem,” Gray said. “Tell us what happened here, Sam.”

  The operator started walking along the machine’s side. “Well, it’s the damndest thing. I got a call from a fella named Oyster, yeah, like the shellfish, and
he had just bought this three hundred acres we’re standin’ on now. Said he wanted the whole thing flipped so he could grow barley. Barley of all things! I told him corn was what moved in the market but he wouldn’t have none of it so I just kept my business my business, you know? What do I care of some fool from the cities wants to lose himself a hundred grand? So I came out here this morning to start, figured it’d take a good two days to churn the whole field up. I got going over there where you can see and was making good time until I came upon this patch here.”

  The air was moist and heady near the open ground but already the dirt was beginning to dry, the hearty red becoming pale. They stopped behind the implement’s left track and Sam pointed toward the fresh soil.

  “Now I seen some things, gentlemen, but never anything like this.”

  Bones protruded from the ground in stark contrasts of white and mottled gray. The entire swath made by the machine was filled with their jagged ends and rounded tops. Nearest to the untouched ground, a full spinal column was attached to a broken skull that looked skyward with its remaining socket. A crescent moon shape with clustered teeth still clinging to it, was half buried close the center, the sunlight shining off of a titanium filling.

  “My God,” Ruthers said panning the scene.

  “That’s about what I said when I looked at the screen that shows where I’ve driven,” Sam said, putting his hands on his hips before spitting onto the ground.

  Gray walked along the edge of the disturbed soil and knelt. A small group of bones were strewn in a circle along with a smattering of shards like that of broken pottery.

  “How deep were you digging when you saw them?” Gray said.

  “Oh I was just getting going since I’d made a turn. Probably twelve feet, give or take an inch. Actually it’s lucky too since the spinners on the blade there hadn’t really gotten up to full RPM, otherwise they would’ve been dust.” Sam paused to spit again. “I guess it’s lucky for you fellas, not for them.”

  Gray stood and moved around the open ground as Ruthers followed, the younger man’s hand on his phone case.

  “What’s your idea, Joseph,” Gray said, stopping on the opposite side of the mass grave.

  “I don’t know, sir. Definitely not an ancient burial site.”

  “Not unless they were filling people’s teeth a thousand years ago.”

  “So I would say this is recent.”

  “How recent?”

  “Fifty years for sure.”

  “I would say closer to twenty.”

  “How many do you think are here?”

  “I counted four different sets of backbones and pelvises, but there’s no telling until we exhume this entire area.”

  “You guys think it’s an old graveyard? Unmarked and whatnot?” Sam called from the other side.

  “Could be,” Gray said and then motioned to Ruthers as he turned away from the bones. “Why isn’t this an unmarked cemetery, Joseph?” he said in a lower voice.

  “Because there’s no debris from any caskets, no stone markers either.”

  “Thatta boy.”

  “So what is this, Sheriff?”

  “A dumping ground.”

  Gray made his way back around the bare earth and stopped beside the Churner’s track.

  “Sam, I’d like you to pull away from this spot nice and easy and then go ahead and take your equipment home.”

  “I can’t finish the job?”

  “Not today.”

  “So what do I tell Oyster?”

  “You tell him whatever you see fit and if he has a problem, direct his calls to my office.”

  Sam wiped his brow and then shrugged. “If that’s the way it is.”

  “It is.”

  Gray led the way to the cruiser and opened the door. He looked out over the burned land. Dead and dying. Bones glowing in the sun, the rich earth offering them up like a sacrifice.

  “Joseph, call this in and request extra personnel for the forensics team.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And Joseph?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell them to bring a lot of evidence bags.”

  ~

  When he turned onto his drive it was fully evening.

  The light was red behind the trees, burning out into a purple horizon. Dust blocked the view behind him and he rubbed his eyes. An SUV sat before the garage when he turned the last bend. It was her spot anyway, the vehicle looked right there. Gray parked next to it in case she was only stopping for something else she’d forgotten and got out.

  He found Lynn watching the last rays course through the trees. She stood beside the barren stream, shadow the only thing that flowed between its banks. He stopped beside her and she didn’t look at him. She stared at the broken skin of the ground, its fissures pleading for water.

  “You said this was going to be hers once,” Lynn finally said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “What anything means when you give it to someone.”

  “She was supposed to have it.”

  “I know. I hate seeing it so dry like this. There should be water here.”

  “She should be here.”

  “Yes, she should.”

  “You weren’t at the funerals today.”

  “I wanted to be. Something came up that I couldn’t let go.”

  “You couldn’t ever let anything go, Mac.”

  He didn’t say anything to that.

  “Davey did so well, you should’ve seen him. He even spoke. I couldn’t have done it.”

  “He’s a special kid.”

  “I would say he’s a man now.”

  He looked at her, watched her not look at him.

  “I’m sorry for the other night,” Gray said. “Not sorry for what I said, but because it hurt you.”

  Lynn was quiet for a long time.

  “You were wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “About me being strong. I was being hypocritical saying you hide from everything. I’m not strong, I fake it.”

  “You can’t fake strength.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  The sun fell away and a blue twilight seeped into the sky. The air cooled only a little, but it was enough. They stood by the dry streambed until it was almost full dark, the air humming with insects. Heat lightning began to pulse on the horizon, striding threads of light, there and gone without a sound.

  Without a word, Lynn began to walk toward her vehicle. He followed.

  “Didn’t you forget anything this time?” He asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything you might need to come in for?”

  She paused near the door of the house, looking up at its height. She was only a shape in the falling dark.

  “It isn’t what I’ve forgotten, it’s what I haven’t.”

  He went to her and didn’t stop until they were inches apart. He reached to pull her close as she brought a hand up and he braced for the slap he knew would come. But it didn’t. Her hand found the back of his neck and guided his face to hers. Their lips met without hesitation, old paths traveled by blind eyes. He pressed himself close to her and she slid her hand through his hair, gripping it, not letting go.

  He got the door open but they only made it to the kitchen floor. Their clothes came free as if cut from their bodies. Hands sliding over buttons and snaps until there was nothing between them. The lightning strobed and they moved, sinuous against one another until she gripped him, guided him into her.

  The dream came back to him then but it was there and gone as she flowed over him, beginning to say his name, slowly at first and then quicker. She chanted and moved above him while he caught glimpses of her in the throbbing light, and the light was inside him and then it was in her. Over and over until it faded with the deafening quiet rushing like a palpable tide into sound.

  They lay there on the floor, holding one another. The tears came without warning, unbidden as
they flowed down his face. She kissed him on the cheek and said his name again, quiet.

  Chapter 34

  Ruthers parked his truck in front of Siri’s brick two-story and turned the radio lower.

  The night had dropped over everything like a curtain while they’d been in the movie theater, and now the only illumination in the cab was from the green glow of the dashboard. Siri’s face was half-lit. She looked at him from where she sat, the portion of her lips in the light was curved up in a smile.

  “That was really nice, I haven’t been to a movie in over a year,” she said.

  “Yeah, it was. Sorry we missed the one you wanted to see.”

  “I think we both had a pretty good excuse.”

  “You can say that again.” Ruthers frowned and looked at the headlights splashed across the yard. Stars glittered from the moonless sky. A black desert of glinting sand.

  “You think he’s right, don’t you?” Siri asked.

  Ruthers looked at her again. “I do.”

  “So you don’t believe Hudson was responsible for all those bodies in the ground or any of the other killings?”

  “Sheriff Gray doesn’t think so.”

  “I didn’t ask you what the sheriff thinks.”

  Ruthers sat for a moment and traced the circle of the steering wheel with a finger.

  “I didn’t believe it for a while, or didn’t want to believe it I guess. But the more I saw, the more it made sense.”

  “What about the Line?” Siri asked, reaching out to touch his shoulder. A wave of gooseflesh flowed outward from the spot.

  “Nothing’s perfect.”

  “Tilly thinks he’s still grieving for his little girl.”

  “I would say she’s right, but he’s a brilliant man, smarter than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “Grief doesn’t care how smart you are.”

  “And instincts outstrip reason sometimes.”

  “You’re very loyal to him.”

  “I am, but he’s earned it.”

  “I hope you’re both wrong.”

  Ruthers sighed. “Me too.”

  They were quiet for a long time. Only the night sounds filtering in from outside the cooled vehicle and the low tune of a song coming from the speakers.