The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  Andrews sniffed. He might even have had a tear in his eye—another by-product of our apple brandy.

  “Hovis can have that effect,” I said quietly.

  “Yes.” Andrews rallied. “And Mr. Jackson? He was, apparently, both happy and go-lucky.”

  “Go-lucky? That’s your phrase? How much of that brandy did you have?”

  “Hovis had most of it,” he said defensively.

  “But you had enough. Let’s get you some food.”

  He was out of the truck before my last syllable was finished.

  Half a dozen scrambled eggs apiece and at least as many waffles later, Andrews was napping on the sofa. I spent a few idle hours trying not to wake him up while I was putting away the rest of the tapes.

  Shadows of the evening grew longer outside, and though it was barely four o’clock, the daylight was ending. I was, embarrassingly enough, enjoying the process of alphabetizing them, when a cannonball of a fact slammed into my chest. Some of the tapes in the J section were missing. I looked frantically under the sofa, the desk, in the corners to make certain they weren’t in the house. When it was obvious that they were gone, I couldn’t decide which to do first, wake Andrews or call Skidmore. That decision was made for me.

  “Christ, what are you doing?” Andrews rumbled. “Can’t you play maid when someone’s not trying to sleep on your sofa?”

  “Wake up,” I demanded, coming around the sofa. “Sit up.”

  Maybe the urgency in my voice made him sit up, maybe he was just angry that I’d awakened him, but he groaned his way to a seated posture fairly quickly.

  “The stranger wasn’t looking for his own tape,” I said before his eyes were focused.

  “What?”

  “The guy who broke into my house and rummaged through the tapes, the same person that killed the dead guy? He wasn’t looking for the tape I made of him!”

  “Then what was he looking for?” Andrews craned his head around to take in the living room bookcase behind him, as if the answer might be on a poster there.

  “He took the three tapes I made of Mr. Jackson a long time ago.”

  “You made tapes of Mr. Jackson?”

  “Mostly singing,” I said quickly, “but they’re all gone. And nothing else is missing.”

  “You couldn’t have just misplaced them?”

  “Who are you talking to?” I glared at him until he nodded.

  “Right,” he agreed, “the guy stole them. But why?”

  “Exactly,” I shot back.

  “Exactly what?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed, though my enthusiasm did not flag. “But I’m calling Skidmore.”

  I dashed into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. Andrews stumbled behind me, trying to form sentences.

  “Isn’t this a bit half-baked?” he mumbled.

  “Melissa?” I barked into the phone. “Is Skidmore there?”

  Alas, he had not returned from his mysterious “lab work” errand. Though it was barely past midafternoon, the sun was already lowering itself behind the western hills. I had always considered an early sunset the single depressing foible of autumn in the mountains. It would be getting dark in less than an hour.

  “Well, would you mind telling him that I have some new evidence and to please not formally charge Hovis Daniels yet?”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said, obviously in doubt of the efficacy of such a plea, “but, you know, he’ll do what he does.”

  “As long as you tell him I’m certain about this, and I that have new evidence.”

  “What new evidence?” she wanted to know.

  “I’ll be down in your offices in just a little while,” I answered. “Thanks, Melissa.”

  I hung up before she could ask any other questions, or insist on any more answers.

  “Why didn’t you tell her about the missing tapes?” Andrews was leaning on the counter where Hovis had bled. There was no sign of the mess he’d made; I had cleaned the place three times.

  “Because,” I answered, staring at the spot where the most blood had been, “it’s not enough to … it doesn’t sound compelling, ‘Three tapes are missing!’ I mean, does it?”

  “Right.”

  “So are you awake?”

  Andrews yawned and scratched his stomach. “I think so. Am I standing in your kitchen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then I’m awake. Why do you ask?”

  s“I want to tell you the other thing I put together while you were napping.”

  “I needed that nap,” he protested.

  “Do you want to hear what I came up with?”

  “Yes.” He managed to sit down at the kitchen table. “Shoot.”

  “I’ve said all along,” I began instantly, “that the visitor, the false Truck Jackson, was not befuddled, that he only wanted us to think he was—and that he was, in fact, looking for something specific. Something was important enough to him that he would kill someone else because of it, or for it.”

  “You’ve said that all along?”

  “He wanted us to think that he was a bit like Hovis,” I continued, ignoring Andrews. “He visited Hovis first. He got some information from that visit that provoked him to go to Lucinda’s house and then to come here.”

  “All in an effort to find something, or to find out something,” Andrews said slowly, trying to keep up.

  “And one of the recurring themes we’ve seen is the struggle of brother against brother—”

  “And the dead man looks like the killer’s brother.” Andrews was catching on.

  “And when Hovis told me that the killer was Cain, I just thought it was the ramblings of a crazy old man, but now I think he was trying to tell me something important.”

  “That Cain killed his brother!” Andrews was getting into the spirit of things, even though he clearly wasn’t awake.

  “No, damn, I know that. Everybody knows that. Damn. He was trying to tell me where the killer might hide.”

  “Might hide? How would—”

  “Where did Cain go after he killed Abel?”

  “I don’t know,” Andrews objected, “into the desert?”

  “He went out east of the garden of Eden, to hide there.”

  “Oh. Right.” Andrews slumped in his chair. “And this helps us how?”

  “You’ve been there with me,” I said softly. “You’ve been to our town cemetery. You just don’t remember that it’s called Eden.”

  Seventeen

  Despite mighty and vociferous protestation, Andrews had agreed, in the end, to come with me to the cemetery. He thought I was crazy, and must have used the phrase “grasping at straws” at least seven times.

  The shadows around the cemetery were quite long by the time we made it all the way up the hill. If there hadn’t been so many taller mountains around, we might have been able to see better, in that kind of golden afternoon light, but the larger rises bullied sunlight, bent it, forced it away from valleys and gorges, and made dark scars over the landscape.

  Still, it was easy to see why no one ever objected to calling the place Eden. City planners from the nineteenth century had taken the time and care to create a park where families could gather, mourners could find peace, and children could play. Alas, more than half the families in the area continued, long after the landscaping was in place and richer families had purchased acre plots, to bury the departed in their own backyards, near a significant tree or close to a convenient rock.

  One of the larger plots was owned by the Jackson family, and ornate crypts had been built in the early 1900s to house important men and women with that name. The wife of Hovis Daniels did not find quite so grand a repose. She was buried on the periphery, near the rusted iron fence that separated the Jackson land from other prominent family plots. Her tombstone called her Bayberry because the company had misunderstood Hovis’s grieving pronunciation of ‘Barbrie’ and he could not afford a correction. No one intervened to help him, to explain to him that the compan
y had made the mistake and ought to correct it at their own expense. He had already given up anyway. How could it matter, he asked me once, what it said on a stone? Barbrie wasn’t there under it. She wasn’t anywhere. She was gone.

  Andrews and I had taken the shortcut up the hill, through briars and weeds. I hadn’t turned on my headlights because it was still, technically, daylight, but lack of ground light made me hit a fairly significant rut in the road right as I turned into the entrance and headed eastward past the perpetually open gates. Just as I hit the bone-crushing crater, Andrews noticed a woman flying through the air, right toward the truck.

  “Jesus God in heaven!” He ducked down.

  “The Angel of Death,” I reminded him.

  “What?” He seemed dazed.

  “The statue. You’ve seen it before.”

  He peeked out the window.

  The large statue, pale gray and covered with moss and lichen, hovered around the first bend in the road. She had been strategically placed so that she would appear to be flying toward visitors. In fact, her feet were molded in concrete from which she had not extricated herself, as far as I knew, for 150 years or more, despite the efforts of her mighty wings.

  We rounded the turn and saw her hovering in a small grove of weeping hemlocks. Blue juniper hid the base of the statue, and creeping ficus threatened to overtake her raiment. Her eyes seemed to gaze down upon the truck, and her sword was poised to smite. Andrews hadn’t seen the thing in a few years, and I was always taken aback by the sight of her. The mood the angel created was impossible to ignore: blessed or cursed, holy or hated, righteous or fiendish—everyone would fall beneath that sword.

  “I’d forgotten about it.” Andrews managed, after a moment, to sit up straight.

  “It even gave me a bit of a turn,” I confessed.

  Everywhere else we looked, we could see dead leaves falling or swirling in the wind, plaiting the ground and covering everything. Shocks of stark amber sunlight striped the ground between yawning black shadows. A murder of huge black crows, disturbed by the truck, suddenly took to the air, and it looked, in the first instant of their flight, as if a shadow had come loose from the ground, broken apart, and was bent on attacking the sun.

  “The Jackson plot is over that way, just beyond the angel,” I told Andrews, mostly to dispel the shivers.

  “Ah,” he responded, eyes glued to the raving birds.

  “We’re going this way.” I turned the truck away from the last of the sunlight.

  We were leaving the light behind us, and the eastern sky was already gouged by hard charcoal shards and the ghost of a near-full moon.

  “You won’t be offended if I just say, once more, that this is a useless waste of time, right?” Andrews folded his arms and slumped down in his seat.

  I’d tried to encourage him to put on one of my coats over his impossibly wrinkled shirt, but some variety of errant testosterone had prevented him from doing it. He was obviously regretting it. The air had taken a sudden plunge through invisible caves of ice, everything had turned colder, and I was glad to have my leather jacket.

  “Not if you won’t be offended at my very emphatic ‘I told you so’ when we find the killer tonight,” I answered him.

  “Never going to happen.”

  The eastern rim of the graveyard ended at the farthest reaches of the Newcomb family area. It was the largest in the cemetery, but the really impressive crypts were at the top of the hill, not where we were headed. Blue Mountain had been called Newcomb Junction until 1925 when Jeribald “Tubby” Newcomb married his half sister and all the resulting progeny bore serious birth defects. After that, everyone in town unanimously agreed to change our name, calling it after the mountain we loved instead of the family we hated.

  As my truck rolled up to the six-foot iron fence that divided graveyard from happier nature, Andrews happened to notice the name on one of the lesser tombstones.

  “Newcomb,” he mumbled. “Wasn’t that the family that owned the show your parents worked for? What was it called?”

  “Like a lot of other traveling entertainments of its sort,” I said tersely, “it was called the Ten Show—ten in one.”

  My parents had provided the most popular of the ten acts. My father had been a relatively renowned magician in the South; my mother, his lovely assistant. Both were ghosts that wouldn’t seem to rest. They often walked the rooms in my house, especially when I was given to darker thoughts. I didn’t care to see if they also visited the Newcomb gravesites, so I deliberately changed the subject.

  “But more to the point,” I said to Andrews as we came to a halt at the edge of the cemetery, “this is where we get out of the truck and explore the far slopes.”

  “What?” He stiffened. “I have to get out of the truck?”

  “There’s a fence.” I nodded in the direction of same.

  “Push it down, run over it. I don’t want to get out of the truck. I’m cold.”

  “You wouldn’t take a jacket—”

  “I didn’t know we were getting out of the bleeding truck!”

  “Bleeding?” I hoped he heard all of the deliberately mocking tone I was using. “You’ll get nowhere with me using that kind of language. I mean, I know the girls go for the accent—which, incidentally, you always exaggerate when you’re flirting—but it means nothing to me.”

  “Then you really won’t like it when I tell you to sod off.”

  “I suppose I might object if I knew what it meant.” I turned off the engine. “But at the moment, I really don’t care.”

  “Knew what it meant? Seriously? I’ve said it to you enough times—”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Winton, are you going to get out of the truck or do I have to go by myself to find the killer?”

  He stopped squirming for a moment, tilted his head. “Um …” He rubbed his nose.

  One of the advantages of rarely calling him by his first name was that when I did, it meant something.

  I only waited a second more before opening the door and plunging into the chilly wind. Without a word, Andrews followed suit.

  “Wait.” I sighed. “There’s a raincoat under the passenger seat. It’ll keep the wind out, at least.”

  I couldn’t tell, in the fading light, if he retrieved the coat reluctantly, but fetch it he did, and was standing beside me at the iron fence in a matter of seconds.

  “What’s over that way?” He whispered the words.

  I understood why his voice was hushed. The view of the landscape beyond the fence was strange enough by daylight, but sunset gave the crags and weeds and dying leaves a kind of animated menace. To make matters worse, some of the darker hollows were blazing with green flame.

  “And what the hell is that burning over there?” he continued.

  “I’ve told you about that.” Despite myself, I realized I was answering him in a low voice. “It’s usually called foxfire—a bioluminescence created by a certain sort of fungus or lichen. You find it on decaying wood. I used to believe that it was primarily a product of only one species of the genus Armillaria, but over the years I think I’ve found as many as forty individual species.”

  “You’ve told me about this?” He couldn’t take his eyes off the eerie blue-green glow—and the darker the shadows, the brighter the fire.

  “It exists everywhere. Pliny and Aristotle mention it. Ben Franklin suggested that the military use it to light the inside of one of our first submarines.”

  “I mean, but what is it?”

  “Believe it or not, a substance called luciferin—same thing that lights up a firefly—reacts with an enzyme, luciferase, and that causes the luciferin to oxidize and make light.”

  “But why would nature do it?”

  “Nobody knows. And I suppose you don’t want me to give you the folk—”

  “Not remotely.” He turned to face me at last. “It’s got something to do with fairies.”

  “Well.” I smiled. “Maybe it attracts bugs to disperse the spores
.”

  “There you go.” He was satisfied. “Got something to do with procreation. I can buy that.”

  “But you did hear that the substance is called luciferin.”

  “So why isn’t it called devil’s fire, then?”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “I’m getting back in the truck.” He didn’t move.

  We both stood staring at the growing darkness and the glowing lights. In moments the sun was gone behind the western hills, and night had arched its back against the moon.

  “All right,” I sighed, grabbing a spine of the moldering fence, “God set the scene: perfect night to go lumbering through the poison berries and wake up a few copperheads to look for a murderer.”

  “Absolutely,” Andrews agreed, tweaking his bravado. “What could possibly go wrong now? I mean, I’ve been shot, you’ve been attacked, Lucinda’s been threatened, an innocent man’s in jail, and there’s a maniac loose. We’re disaster-proof. What else could happen?”

  He set his foot on the rail and hoisted himself up. Alas, that entire section of fencing instantly collapsed forward, sending Andrews plowing into the weeds and dirt outside the cemetery.

  “There’s a lesson in this,” I said, stepping over the fallen fence and going to help him up.

  “Bite me,” he said, spitting leaves and clay.

  I got him to stand up, but it didn’t look like he was going to move. Somehow, outside the fence of the graveyard, he felt unprotected—I did, too.

  We were standing near the top of the mountain. Straight around and upward, huge boulders loomed, black sentinels in the growing darkness. A few hundred yards below us lay a dense forest of pines and cedars and bare oak trees—the perfect home for genus Armillaria and the devil’s own fire.

  “We could start down there.” I pointed toward the foxfire.