by Alexie Aaron
“Honestly, I don’t think Burt is going anywhere, anytime soon. Without saying too much, he’s got a whopper of a head wound and seems to be hallucinating. For his sake, we had to put him in restraints.”
“Have you called the cops yet?”
“I think I have to.”
“Ask for a deputy named Tom Braverman. He’s in charge of Mrs. Martin’s case and my attack. He should be made aware of this latest incident.”
“Thanks, Mia. I understand this puts you in a vulnerable position with your friend.”
“I have more than one friend. They just have different agendas, that’s all. Is he awake?”
“Kinda hard to tell.”
“Some medical professional,” she teased.
“I may have missed that class. You want to talk to him? I think he can hear you, but he isn’t talking to anyone.”
“Not important. Can you transfer me? Ask someone to hold the phone to his ear, please?”
“It would be my pleasure,” Doctor Walters said as he managed to perform the operation without cutting Mia off or pissing off the hospital’s phone system.
He heard it ring in Burt’s room and nodded to M&M to pick up the phone. He mouthed, “Mia.” She nodded and put the phone to Burt’s ear.
“Burt, I don’t know if you can hear me or even feel like conversing, so I’m just going to keep talking. I’m so sorry you’ve been hurt. Something bad is messing around in the hollow, something way above your and my pay grade. You’re safe as long as you stay away from there.”
“I can’t be with you right now. I’ve been shanghaied and marooned in the city. Hold on, and, if you can, think of the good things in life. Maybe even the good things we’ve shared. When I get there and you get healed, we’re going to get some revenge. I guarantee that. I’ll be back, and I’ll be bringing in the big guns.”
Mia hung up, and Burt listened to the dial tone before turning away from the handset. M&Ms hung up the phone and adjusted Burt’s covers. She left, and Burt wondered who the other nurse was in the corner. She looked like a nun.
~
Mia put her phone down and let her head fall and clunk on the table. The altar cloth did little to alleviate one stupid move by a person with a head injury. She had been reading Rebecca’s account of a fishing party along the Cold River, which was puzzling enough. Where was the river? Did the dam turn the river into the small winding creek? She would have to find out.
Adding to her thoughts was Burt’s attack. It did no good to shout I-told-you-so from the battlements. They were just words, unkind words. What Burt needed now was encouragement. Mia wanted to know what had possessed them to go into the hollow. Shit, she promised Whit she wouldn’t contact PEEPs. The only calls she was supposed to have were from him or the hospital - so technically the last one qualified.
She tilted her head sideways and scanned the contents of the table. Somewhere in the remaining papers could be a solution or at least information leading to a solution. Mia picked up her head, sat up and started reading again.
“The Lewis boy ran away last night. He’s still being hunted down by the men of ‘the club,’ but so far this morning, there is no sign of the five-year-old.”
Mia flipped through several pages until she found another reference to the Lewis boy.
“Mrs. Lewis is beside herself. It’s time to move back into the city, and still no sign of her little boy. Father thinks the kid is hiding out with a local. Mother fears the boy is dead in the woods somewhere, possibly drowned in the river. I think that they should ask ‘the club.’ Those men have been pretty hush-hush as of late.”
Mia jotted down “the club” and wondered which men of the hollow had been part of it. She surmised that the Lewis family were the former owners of the white house. The very house this box may have come from. The carved ivy depicting summer scenes of birds and vines on this box and the staircase were done by the same hand. Mia closed her eyes and replayed the images of the child running down the hall and climbing out the window. Could that have been the Lewis boy?
The man chasing the child had a parental air about him. Mia entered the first name under “the club”: Mr. Lewis. She also penciled his name in the spot indicated by Whit’s map.
~
Beth had just set up the last of the trip cameras when her phone vibrated. She jammed her hand into her pocket, pulled out the phone, read the caller ID and saw it was Mike. “Fuck this,” she said and put the phone back in her pocket. She wasn’t going to let her last chance of capturing the rider be lost just because Mike didn’t like the way Ted or Burt was filming his “rugged” jawline. Beth considered herself an investigator skilled in the tech arena, not some magician with a camera that could take a double chin and make it look rugged.
The first trip camera would not catch anything, but it would trigger the rest in succession. She did her research. She knew how fast a galloping horse could go and made adjustments from the EVPs they had caught earlier in the week.
Mike dismissed her interest in this residual haunting as a waste of time. Burt applauded the effort but didn’t have much faith in actually capturing the rider on film or digital media.
Beth proved him wrong with the digital tape recorder. Now she would see if this pirated technology added to her minor adjustments would let them see a moving video of the horse and rider.
A slight breeze moved out of the trees, caressing the new growth of vegetation along the hillside. It went in waves. Beth patted herself on the back at having the foresight to anchor each camera stand. She became mesmerized at the beauty that a breeze could paint. She saw earlier in the day how the wind could turn these weeds and brambles into a ballet of young greens and old wood.
From this vantage point, she could see down into the hillside across the plain to the west. There the breeze was moving over the prairie grasses in lapping waves. She turned to the east. The hill of grass continued for a quarter of an acre before the scrub of the encroaching woods started.
Beth heard the crack of an axe which alerted her that something was happening. She scanned the valley and saw that the breeze was separating the grasses to each side. Beth pulled up the camera, looked through the lens and started filming the parting of the grass and weeds as a path was made and the sound of approaching hoof beats reached her ears.
There was a disturbance, a wave pattern that moved with the sound. Beth had to stop herself from yelling “woo hoo” as each trip camera fired as the thundering hoof beats passed them. She could have sworn that she could see a horse, a big bay, with unshod hooves. The rider, a barely-clothed male, moved in concert with the horse. The two became one.
As they passed Beth, the rider lowered his upper body to the horse’s, and with the energy of pure exhilaration, the two launched themselves over an obstruction and disappeared.
Beth brought the camera down and jumped in the air. She knew she caught something. It wasn’t just an apparition recorded on celluloid. She caught the joy of a part of this world that would forever be lost. “Not anymore,” she said aloud. “Thanks, Murphy.”
The sound of axe hitting wood answered her. Beth smiled from ear to ear as she went about the task of collecting her gear and securing it before she lost daylight.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Burt struggled against the hands again. They had his arms and legs. The leering face was laughing at his screams. “Help me, God help me,” he screamed. A warm hand was placed on his forehead. The nightmare evaporated and was replaced by a cadence of Latin words from a soft female voice, along with the sound of hands moving over beads. These foreign words and sounds fought the memory of his fight with the invisible.
A distant male voice moved in concert with the woman’s. The warm hand was replaced with a cool one.
Burt struggled to open his eyes, and when he did, his sight was hampered by a hand placed gently over them.
“Stay calm, my son,” a slightly accented male voice instructed. “May the peace of heaven above fill your
soul. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.”
The hand was lifted, and Burt focused on the lined, tan face of a priest. He saw behind him the habited nun moving her hands along a rosary.
“I’m Father Santos. Mia asked me to look in on you.”
“Mia.” Burt’s heart jumped. “Is she here?”
“No, my son, she can’t be. I know she wants to be, but this evil could destroy her. We must do everything we can to keep this away from her. This is your fight, not hers,” Father Santos counseled.
“I don’t understand.” Burt tried to move his arms and found them pinned to his sides.
“The restraints are for your protection.”
“But it feels like...”
The priest raised his hand to stop Burt. He turned to someone on the other side of the room. “Could we have some privacy.”
“Yes, Father,” M&Ms said as she moved outside the room, closing the door behind her.
“It’s time to tell me everything.” Father Santos moved a chair close to Burt’s head. “You have the protection of my vows. I will not judge. It is only for God to do so.”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“You’re a lamb of God. That’s enough for me.” Santos smiled faintly.
“Before I begin, can I ask you who is the woman in the corner?”
Father Santos turned around. “Can you describe her to me?”
“She’s elderly, wearing a nun’s habit...”
“Sister Agnes?” Father asked the corner of the room.
“She’s nodding,” Burt told him.
“It’s an honor, Sister,” Santos said before he made the sign of the cross and bowed his head slightly. He turned back to Burt. “If I had known you were in such good hands, I wouldn’t have broken the speed limit getting here.”
“You can’t see her?”
The priest shook his head sadly. “Sister Agnes has been looking after the weak and damned for nigh on sixty years since she passed on. If you stay too long, she may actually bring you to the ‘true faith.’” Santos chuckled. “I’ve heard stories, but I never thought I’d meet her.”
Burt looked from the nun to the priest and back again.
“Don’t try to figure it out; you’ll just get a headache. Now, time to unburden yourself.”
Burt started talking, and while Father Santos listened, Sister Agnes silently moved her hands over her rosary.
~
“I appreciate you calling me, M&Ms,” Mia said while massaging the back of her aching neck with the other hand. “How long has the father been with him?”
“I left them alone an hour ago. I’m running interference with the other staff right now. Vitals are behind.”
“Can you tell me how he’s doing?”
“After the father arrived, he seemed to be gaining ground. I think you did the right thing having him stop by.”
“He was headed in that direction when I got ahold of him. Just a little detour, that’s all it was,” Mia said, still trying to convince herself. “Thank you for the update.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I want to roll in chocolate,” Mia confessed.
“Oooh, sounds like fun. Talk to you later.” M&Ms disconnected the call and placed another one to Doctor Walters.
~
Mia set the phone down, stepped over the salt line and headed into the bathroom. She ran the water until it came up nice and hot. Mia undressed and stepped into the shower, letting the hot water work on the crick in her neck. She missed her shower at home, and as she lathered her hair with the stale shampoo left there, she thought about her earlier calls. The first one was to Bernard to get Father Santos’s number. The second call had been harder to make.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know the priest. He, like Bernard and Ralph, were friends of her parents. With each connection to their community of friends, Mia should have felt a closeness to the woman who birthed her, but this wasn’t the case. Each of these people from her past knew of the non-association of Mia’s mother with her child. They put out invisible bonds of pity that attached to Mia. They had tried to make up for the cord that was severed before she had even left the womb.
Ralph was just angry. If he could have fought evolution in order to suckle this child himself, he would have found a way. Instead he hovered over her, spoiled her and disciplined her to keep her safe. It had been his hands that pulled her out of the way of cars in the road or dogs that were snappish and took the stones from her hand that would have crashed through the windows.
It had been his hands that steadied her first steps. His checkbook that supplied the money that gave her independence after her parents lost interest in being in the country. After the house burned down, Mia chose to nurse her grandmother instead of abiding by Ralph’s counsel to go on to college, live with him and Bernard. This had put a gulf between them.
“What a waste. You have such a mind. Look at your DNA, my God!” His words haunted her.
“It’s my DNA that has made me a freak,” she spat back at him. “I need to be somewhere I can sleep through the night without waking to something that refuses to move on.”
“Bernard and I can help you.”
“I need to find my own way,” she insisted and broke the heart of the man who was, in all but blood, her parent.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Whit stood next to the casket and stared down at Sherry’s body. How did this beautiful, creative woman turn into this painted shell? His mother-in-law insisted on choosing the casket and the clothes she wore. The woman even had the audacity to hand him Sherry’s wedding ring.
“She doesn’t need this anymore,” she said as she dropped the ring into his hand.
“Are you freaking kidding me? Sherry was my wife and loved being my wife, and my wife is going to be buried with my ring on her finger,” Whit demanded and walked off to deliver the ring back to the undertaker.
The ring now rested on her finger. His mother ran interference between him and Sherry’s mom. No one messed with Carol Martin’s son. She may not have thought that Sherry was a good match for Whit, but he loved her, and that was all she needed. Now he was hurting, and she’d be damned if she would let anyone else add to the pain. Her husband stood mutely in the back of the room, giving his son silent support.
Whit had brought along one of Sherry’s most beloved canvases. Appropriately named “Springtime in Illinois,” it was an abstract of a flower that exploded with color. He had the funeral director place it next to her coffin.
Sherry’s mom, who wasn’t a fan of her own daughter’s work, had done her best to hide it with the floral arrangements sent to honor her. Whit picked up and moved the large arrangements to the back, and in doing so, he discovered a small tasteful arrangement.
Drawn to it, he picked out the card and was touched that Tom’s family took the time and expense to send flowers. What surprised him was the addition of one name: Mia Cooper.
“What have you got there, Whit?” Mark Martin asked.
“Some flowers sent by some folks back home.” He handed the card to his dad.
“The Bravermans, don’t you work with their youngest?”
“Yes, Tom. He’s actually the deputy in charge of Sherry’s case.”
“Yes, yes, I remember you telling your mother that.” Mark looked down at the card again. “Mia Cooper. Is she dating Tom? I remember her as being your age, cute little girl with that god awful, verbose father and drifty mother.”
“I don’t think they’re dating, at least they weren’t when I left... She’s a friend.”
“Whatcha doing?” asked Carol Martin over her husband’s shoulder.
“Discussing whether Tom Braverman is dating Mia Cooper.”
“Really? I always thought our Whit had a soft spot for her,” she said, patting Mark on the shoulder. “I’m going back to the hotel for another pair of shoes, want anything?”
“If you happen to go by the gift shop and happen
to buy a candy bar and happen to put it in your purse...”
“You’re leaving a lot up to providence, my dear,” Carol said. “Snickers or Butterfinger?”
“Both.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
“I’m in mourning,” he explained.
“I’ll see what happens. Whit, how about you?”
“Nothing thanks. I’m barely keeping my breakfast down.”
Carol walked over and hugged her son. “Two more days, and things will start to mend.”
“I hope so, Ma, I really do,” Whit said. He and his father watched as Carol left the room. “Dad, I’ve got something to get off my chest.”
“I figured that. Can it wait until later this evening?”
“Yes, later at the hotel,” Whit agreed.
Mark handed his son the card. Whit placed it carefully in the arrangement and adjusted the flowers so they would be seen. Sherry’s mother had entered the room, and her face flamed as she saw what he was doing.
“Here comes the dragon,” Mark warned.
“Don’t worry, I can stand my ground, but don’t run off in case I need backup.”
“I got your back, son.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Whit steeled his spine and prepared himself for battle.
~
Tom had just got in off of morning patrol when the sheriff waved him into his office. He noticed a man of the cloth, perhaps a priest, sitting there, enjoying a cup of coffee with his boss.
“Tom, this is Father Santos. Father, this is Deputy Tom Braverman.”
The priest rose, presented a strong hand and clasped Tom’s with a mighty grip.
“Nice to meet you, Father.”
“Deputy.”
“Father Santos is here to help evaluate Amber. If she claims she’s possessed then it behooves us to bring in experts in the field,” the sheriff explained.
