by Sharon Short
I giggled, and pounded at him as he pulled me to him and then started to dip me. “You know I never made the squad!”
“But you have such delightful pom-poms, my darling . . .”
My next wave of giggles was thwarted by his kiss. Not bloodsucking, thankfully, but definitely blood-heating . . . until we heard the proverbial bloodcurdling shriek.
But it wasn’t playful, or coming from Lenny’s quadrant. It was coming from outside the maze. And was followed by the words, “Get off of our property! Or we’re callin’ the police!”
Owen and I stood up quickly. I shone my flashlight on the map. “We’re here,” I said, pointing to the northwest corner of the maze on the map, “and the hollering’s coming from right about here—which is right by the road.” I grabbed Owen’s arm. “Come on. Let’s see what’s going on.”
“We don’t know our way out of the maze yet,” Owen said. “Whatever’s going on will be over by the time we get there.”
“Short cut,” I said, folding up the maze map and stuffing it into my purse. Then I turned my flashlight to a break in the back wall of corn. It was bad corn-maze etiquette, but someone had obviously gotten tired of trying to figure out the maze, and had crashed on through. Several stalks of corn were bent backward, leaving a gap just wide enough for a person to edge through sideways.
I went on through and trotted a few steps before stopping to look around and gain my bearings. We were right by the road, near the entrance to the Crowleys’ corn maze.
And then I saw what all the hollering was about. “Oh, for pity’s sake, would you look at this, Owen?”
Dru Purcell and a dozen or so others had gathered at the entrance with signs. The entrance was well lit, so I could make out the wording—HALLOWEEN IS EVIL! BE A-MAZED BY GOD, NOT CORN-MAZED BY THE DEVIL! JUST SAY NO TO PAGAN HOLIDAYS!
I gasped.
“This is private property,” Hugh Crowley was hollering at Dru. “You have no right to be here, messing with our fundraiser and scaring our customers! What do you have against our corn maze, anyway?”
“If it were simply a corn maze, that would be fine,” Dru shouted back. “Or if it were populated by people dressed as Bible characters, say.”
“Jesus and Moses in a corn maze?” Hugh sounded incredulous.
But Dru took his comment seriously. “Yes, my brother, yes, Amen! Young people dressed as Jesus and Moses, passing out Bible scriptures . . . what a testament of faith that would be . . .” His voice started to tremble with the wonder of a biblically populated corn maze until his wife, Missy, poked him.
“But instead, you have young people dressed up in costumes of the devil!” Dru shouted.
“Now, look, Pastor, let’s go talk quietly as two men of God.” I recognized the voice of my own pastor, Micah Lamb, although I couldn’t see him. I had to smile. Pastor Micah had a gift for finding common ground among people. “We don’t want to disturb this fundraiser for these good people . . .”
“I don’t recollect any of the volunteers dressing up as a devil.” That was Rebecca Crowley. I couldn’t quite see her, either. Her voice was trembling. “Just some ghouls and princesses and witches . . .”
“It’s the holiday of the devil,” Dru said, his voice stretching with infinite patience. Poor lost soul, his tone proclaimed. His followers shouted “Amen,” and Dru was off, sermonizing, shouting “tonight we protest this evil corn maze, tomorrow night the evil psychic fair!” His voice drowned out Hugh and Rebecca, and even Micah.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “Owen, let’s go see if we can help Pastor Micah to get Pastor Dru and his cronies to leave the poor Crowleys alone.”
Owen didn’t say anything. I turned back to look at him.
And gasped again—but this time, not in consternation. In surprise.
I’d hurried out through the split in the corn, my gaze focused straight ahead. Owen had sidled out more slowly and had seen what I had missed in my hurry: two feet, sticking out of the corn in the corner of the maze. Owen was shining his flashlight on the feet wearing hot-pink high-top tennis shoes.
Where had I seen shoes like those before? And then I remembered. On Ginny Proffitt’s feet. Just that morning.
I ran over to Owen’s side, stared into the corner of the corn maze, all sound—the ruckus just down the road, the night bugs’ chattering, the corn shocks’ dry papery rustling in the wind—giving way to a high buzzing in my head.
I forced myself to breathe slowly, to focus on the body in the corn stalks, lit by our high-powered flashlights.
“It can’t be,” I muttered. “She’s—” my voice trailed off and I finished the thought silently: supposed to be at the psychic fair.
But there was no mistaking that the body was Ginny Proffitt’s, swathed in her gold lamé robe, wearing her high-top hot-pink sneakers. Her crystal ball and its holder were by her head, turned so that we could see only the left side and the ghastly hole from a bullet. God only knew what the right side of her head, pressed against the ground, looked like, where the bullet had exited.
My stomach roiled at the thought, and then I started shaking. “Owen?” His name came out in a thin mewl. But it was enough to draw him to me, and, although shaking himself, he hugged me to him, and I turned my face to his shoulder, away from the sight of poor dead Ginny Proffitt.
6
After we found Ginny’s body, I immediately called 911 on my cell phone. Owen stayed by her body while I got Rebecca away from the ruckus at the front of the property. I left Hugh and Pastor Micah still arguing with Dru and his followers.
At first, Rebecca thought I was trying to tell her I’d called the police because of the ruckus. She’d started shaking, tears streaming down her face as she said, “Josie, I wish you hadn’t called the police. We don’t need any more trouble from Dru Purcell. We can handle it.”
Her comment struck me as odd. She made it sound as if Dru had given her family trouble before that night. I hadn’t heard talk of any trouble between the Crowleys and Dru. Now, I knew the Crowleys, like me, went to the Methodist church, avoiding Dru’s hard-line yet growing following, but as far as I knew they’d been friends with the Purcells a long time. Dru and Ed, in fact, had been star quarterback and running back, respectively, on the East Mason County High School football team, taking the school all the way to the state finals, where we lost against West Mason County High School. That was back in the early 1970s—a few years before I was born—but still, I knew about it because everyone still talked about it, the biggest football victory East High had ever experienced. That kind of thing becomes town lore.
So I was curious what Rebecca meant by her comment implying they’d had trouble with Dru in the past, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. I heard Owen saying, “Get back in the maze!”
I grabbed Rebecca’s arm and pulled her after me. We got to the outside corner of the maze in time to hear a group of cheerleaders giggling as they walked on the other side of the corn stalks, and one saying, “I wonder what all the hollering is about out there?” and another giggling, “Who cares! Let’s go back to see Lenny!”
I turned to tell Rebecca gently that she might not want to go forward and see what Owen had been keeping the kids from—but when I looked at her, I realized she had already trotted over to Owen, huffing with the effort. Rebecca’s fifty-plus and a bit on the heavy side. Her body went rigid as she stared down at Ginny. She turned and walked a few steps away, then crumpled to her knees and put her hands to her face and began sobbing.
I went over to Rebecca, knelt down beside her, and put my arms around her. She remained stiff, at first, and then leaned back into me, letting me hold her as she kept crying. I reckoned that this was too much for her, what with having lost her husband Ed just two months before, and now worrying about Maureen and Ricky.
Her family and the Methodist youth group had only wanted to raise money to help Maureen and Ricky, but it surely hadn’t gone well—the protest by Dru and his followers was bad enough, but fin
ding one of the psychics dead at the maze . . . this was just too horrible for Rebecca.
In the meantime, Dru and Hugh kept shouting at each other, while Pastor Micah tried to calm them down, with Dru’s followers every now and then shouting a hearty “Amen!” in response to Dru’s rhetoric, unaware that a most unholy scene was just yards away.
But when the first police car arrived, most of Dru’s followers silently wandered off. Dru, Micah, and Hugh stopped shouting as Chief John Worthy got out of his police car and started toward them. Then all three men began talking at the same time to Worthy, but no longer shouting, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
“I’m taking Rebecca over to Chief Worthy,” I called to Owen.
“I’ll keep watch here,” Owen said grimly.
“Come on, Rebecca,” I said. “We have to go talk to the police.”
I thought I’d have to help her up, but suddenly she stood up, shaking me from her so hard that I went from kneeling to landing on the ground with a hard thump. She wavered for a moment, as if she were light-headed, and then squared her shoulders and marched over to the men.
It took her a second to get their attention. She turned and pointed past me to where Owen stood by Ginny’s body. Then Rebecca slumped into Hugh, who put his arms around her. They stayed in a tight embrace, swaying together under the light, as if stuck in a sad little dance.
Chief Worthy said something into his hand radio, then unclipped a flashlight from his belt, turned on the light, and trotted up the gently sloped field toward me. Dru followed him. I frowned at that. Shouldn’t Dru stay back, with the Crowleys?
Worthy stopped when he got to me. He wasn’t even huffing a little. He’s always been in fantastic shape. So annoying. He turned the flashlight on my face. His stamina isn’t the only annoying thing about him.
I squinted. “Could you get that out of my eyes?”
He lowered it a little. “Mrs. Crowley said the body is over here, but she wasn’t sure who it was.”
“Ginny Proffitt. One of the psychics from the psychic fair over at the Red Horse Motel this weekend,” I said, then gave a brief explanation of how Owen and I had come out of the maze through a break in the cornstalks to see what all the shouting was about, and then found Ginny’s body.
“Who did you say you found?” Dru Purcell had finally caught up with Worthy and huffed out his question between gasping breaths. He was not in shape like Chief John Worthy. But he was still annoying.
Worthy frowned at him. “This is a crime scene, Pastor Purcell. I want you back over by the light with the Crowleys.”
I ignored Dru. “Do you want me to wait over there, too? I can direct the other officers over here—”
“I was patrolling in the area and that’s why I got here first,” Worthy said, cutting me off. He was directing his comments solely to Dru. “When the other officers and the emergency crew get here, direct them over this way. And wait by the light pole. I’ll have questions for both you and—” he finally cut me a glance “—Ms. Toadfern.” He looked back at Dru. “Make sure she doesn’t stick her nose in where it shouldn’t be.”
I turned and started walking quickly back down the slope to the light pole, Deputy Dru huffing along right behind me. God only knew what he’d do if I kept right on walking past the light pole and to my car to wait for Owen—which I was tempted to do. Probably grab me and shout, “Citizen’s arrest! Praise the Lord!!”
Not a pleasant thought. So, I did as Chief Worthy had asked and stopped by the light pole. I leaned against the pole, stared at the few buggy critters flying around in the light. At least it wasn’t spring, when the bugs would have been swarming.
“Josie?”
I glared at Deputy Dru.
He drew in a long, shuddery breath, his potbelly jiggling behind his suit jacket, which strained at the button. “Now I know, Josie, we’ve had our differences in the past—”
I rolled my eyes. Having “differences” would mean, say, one person liking pork rinds and the other wanting tater tots. Our differences were more like, well, barbeque-flavored pork rinds versus salad with non-fat dressing. Or like heaven and hell. (And my own theology is that heaven will have pork rinds with all the flavor and none of the fat.)
“—but won’t you join me in a word of prayer for the fallen soul—” he waved a hand “—over yonder?” He held out his hands, expecting me to take them. Sweat glistened on his palms and brow. If he took off his jacket, I just knew I’d see sweat stains on his underarms.
“Don’t you want to know who we’re praying for?”
“Rebecca said it was one of them psychics,” Dru Purcell said. “So I’m sure their soul is lost. But despite my moral obligation to fight their Satanic influence, it’s also my moral obligation to pray for their soul even as it wends its way to the fiery depths of hell. . .”
He broke that last word into two syllables, as if hiccupping in the middle of it, lifting his hands to the heavens, or at least to the sparse autumnal bug population in the light.
“The dead person is Ginny Proffitt,” I interrupted harshly. “She appears to have been murdered.”
For a moment, Dru went as solid as if he’d glanced Gomorrah over his shoulder. His hands dropped to his side. I thought he was going to fall straight over. Then he drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and put a trembling hand to his brow, wiping away the sudden beading of sweat.
In that moment, he stopped being a caricature of himself, of the identity of righteous, knows-it-all preacher he’d created for himself. He looked lost. Scared. Confused. He looked simply . . . human. I felt a surge of pity for him.
“You knew her, didn’t you? I mean, personally,” I said softly.
He put the handkerchief away and stared at me as if trying to figure out who I was. Then he looked around as if trying to figure out where he was and how he’d gotten there. For a moment, I thought maybe he’d snapped. Could a person get amnesia all of a sudden, just forget who he was because of something terrible he’d heard? Did Ginny mean that much to him?
“Pastor Purcell? You knew Ginny Proffitt?” I asked again.
Suddenly he looked at me, his dark eyes intense. “Yes, young lady, I knew her. I knew her to be a force of evil come to our town. A practitioner of the dark arts. A follower of—”
“No, I mean you knew her personally. I saw you with her at Serpent Mound. You were embracing, as if you were old friends,” I said. Or lovers. But I didn’t have the guts to say that.
Dru gave me a long look. Finally, he said, “No. I do not know Ginny Proffitt personally.”
“I saw you with her at Serpent Mound.”
He shook his head. “I was not there with her. I was not there at all. The place should be razed, in my opinion. You know I’ve spoken out on that many times.” Oh yes, I knew. Dru’s absolute certainty in his self-made brand of Christianity really did extend to wanting to see thousands-years-old remnants of an ancient civilization destroyed. “You must be mistaking me for someone else.”
“You’re pretty unmistakable,” I snapped.
Dru glared at me. “I was not at Serpent Mound with Ginny Proffitt.”
“You’re counting on me being the only one who saw you, just because mine was the only face you saw looking outside the bus? But you can’t be sure I’m the only one who saw you,” I said. “And it’s a small town. Word will get around.”
He gave a short laugh. “It hasn’t yet. And what are people more likely to believe—my word, or yours and a van full of psychics no one wanted here in the first place?”
“Most people in Paradise were fine with the psychic fair,” I said. “The only opponents were you and your followers. And I’ve never really understood why. What are you so afraid of?”
He started to speak, but I held up my hand and went on. “No, I don’t want the same old answer about the dark arts. I want to know why you personally are so afraid of these people. And of Ginny Proffitt in particular.”
A brief shadow of sadness pas
sed over his face. Then the know-it-all mask he usually wore returned. “I got the names of the psychics from the fair brochure and researched them on the Internet. They all have Web sites advertising their dark arts,” he said with disgust. “The other psychics are misguided, of course. Some even proclaim to be Christian as they practice their black arts. But like the LeFevers, Ginny Proffitt is a self-avowed Wiccan. A follower of Satan.”
“Being Wiccan isn’t the same as following Satan,” I said. “In fact, Wiccan is just the opposite—a very peaceful, loving belief system. At least get your facts right. Besides, did you know that Wicca, although still small, precentage-wise, is the fastest-growing religion in this country, according to some surveys?”
“All the more reason to stamp it out quickly,” Dru said.
I sighed. There would be no convincing this man to be more open-minded . . . or to admit he’d been with Ginny at Serpent Mound. I stared back up at the light. I was through trying to talk to him.
John Worthy, followed by Officer Corey Spalding and Owen, came down the rise to us.
“I’m going to have to ask each of you some questions. Shouldn’t take long,” he said.
I jerked a thumb at Dru. “Ask him about how he met Ginny Proffitt at Serpent Mound today.”
“I have no idea what she’s talking about, Chief,” Dru said.
I glared at him. “Sure you do. And you know I know.”
After that, Owen and I answered Officer Spalding’s questions. He didn’t have many. Owen and I told him all we knew, which wasn’t much.
As we walked quietly back to the grassy parking area, we saw the ambulance, carrying Ginny’s body, pull out silently onto Mud Lick Road.
We remained quiet until we got to Owen’s old BMW.
“I don’t much feel like being alone tonight,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Owen said, giving me a gentle smile.
7
There’s something about the scent and the quietness of my laundromat when I first enter it—before customers come, before the washers and dryers are humming and thrumming—that’s always comforting.
