The Hawley Book of the Dead (42 page)

The darkness fell early. In spite of the storm, the power still held. Snow fell thick and fast outside the window. I never did hear the whump of the generator, and just before the murky gloaming sank to full blackness outside, Eddy stuck his head in the door.

“Can’t get the wretched thing going. It wouldn’t hurt to rustle up all the candles and flashlights.”

“Already did. What we have is on the kitchen table. But I’m still hoping for Nathan.”

He looked out at the purple sky, voiced my fear. “Be a small miracle if Nathan can get up the hill in this. Even with the four-wheel drive. Snow’s coming down hard. As much as a foot an hour, now.”

“At least Jolon should be here any minute.”

“Hope so. Haven’t heard a sled, though. Only some big, cracking sounds. Like the trees being yanked up by the roots.” He looked worried. I remembered he lived in the desert, wasn’t used to this kind of storm. I’d heard the cracking sounds, too, as if cannons were being set off in Hawley Forest.

“This house has stood up to big storms before this. Two hundred years of them. But … Eddy?”

He turned back to me.

“You don’t think anyone could be out there, do you?”

“In this?”

“When I was out in the barn, I thought maybe someone was there.”

“Did you see something?”

I shook my head. “Just had a feeling.”

He smiled, patted the quiver full of bristling arrows at his side. “Nothing I can’t take care of, dearie. I’ll have a look, though, before the storm gets any worse. Just so you won’t worry yourself.” He grabbed his coat off a hook, shrugged into it, slipped the quiver back into place.

“Back soon.”

I hoped he would be.

Caleigh woke with a start. She could feel him in the string she held, the man who was coming for her mother. Not her good white string, blue instead. But she wove the pattern called “The Star” with it. And she saw him clear.

Her Nan was by her. “Is the man there now?”

“He’s in the barn.”

“All right, love, it’s time to begin.” Nan took the blue string from Caleigh’s fingers, replaced it with her good white string. Caleigh sighed with pleasure to hold her own string again. Her fingers started working it, without her thinking. Her Nan started the same pattern in blue.

In a theater on the Las Vegas Strip, a matinee performance was about to begin. The audience rustled and sighed, flipped through their programs to read about the magic show called
Web of Darkness
.

The stew was bubbling fragrant on the stove. I washed and tore lettuce for a salad. I’d made enough food for three men and one woman with no appetite to live on for days if need be. If any of them made it back. I picked up the phone to call Jolon, but heard only flat silence from the receiver. The landline was out. I unplugged my cell phone from its charger, thinking there would at least be a cell signal. But when the display lit up, there was not even one bar. I walked all over the house, checking for a signal. Nothing in the parlor or on the second floor. I heard the blasts of wind howling round the house. On the third-floor landing, I made out one faint bar, punched Jolon’s number, but got only a network busy notice. I tried Nathan’s number with the same result.

I was about to head back down when I stopped. I’d set up a reading nook on the landing, an armchair and a lamp under the one round window, now ink blue in the failing light. Caleigh’s
At the Back of the North Wind
was sprawled open beneath the chair; a piece of blue string was coiled near it. I picked the string up, tucked it in my pocket.

The landing was usually one of the warmest spots in the house, heat rising as it does. Today it had an icy chill. The door of my office was open
a crack, and as I moved toward it, I felt more cold air pouring through the gap. I opened it wider and saw the French doors gaping, the curtains flapping lazily like wet ghosts, saturated with the weight of melted snow and ice. The smell of lilacs was almost overwhelming. I turned on the lights, and they flickered, but that was all. Only the faint light of stormy dusk filled the room.

I ran to the widow’s walk, looking for some sign, a reason the doors might be open. They had been locked, and no one had cause to be up on the third floor at all. The darkness was nearly impenetrable. The widow’s walk was buried in knee-deep snow, not one indentation to suggest a footstep. But my heart pounded anyway. I looked out over what I could still see of Hawley Five Corners. The pitched silhouette of the church steeple, the gables of the barn. No figures in the fast-falling snow. No Falcon Eddy. The wind seemed to be tearing at the trees, rending them, but the house was strangely still around me.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
.

I stepped back to close the storm out, and just then I heard a pop. It was a sound I knew intimately, one that had nothing to do with the storm. The sound I’d heard a hundred times, every time Jeremy and I performed Defying the Bullets, his final trick on this earth. The pop of a gun being fired.

Time seemed to hold me in its rough grip. I tried to hurry, to race down the stairs, leap into my boots, grab a flashlight, but every motion was as slow and ungainly as nightmare flight. The truth was, I didn’t really want to know the particulars of that gunshot. I hoped it was my imagination, a cracking tree limb, a branch bowed and snapped by the weight of snow, deceiving me. But the place around my heart that had been hollowed out by the shot that killed Jeremy, that place knew. Even before I got to the barn, snow pelting my face, sinking into the downy stuff up to my thighs. Before I saw the open door, the trail of dark liquid. Before smelling not the iron scent of blood, but the heavy purple one of lilacs, before I saw Eddy’s bulk lying in the aisle. I knew I was alone with the man who’d killed Maggie and Jeremy. The man who wanted to kill my daughters.

I fell to my knees, grabbed Eddy’s wrist to check for his pulse. Nothing.
I remembered something I’d seen on TV, licked my palm and held it to his open lips. No breath cooled it. He would go to Tir na nÓg. If it existed.

Then I saw the yellow square of a Post-it note stuck to his parka. On it was scrawled a smiley face. Below the smiley face were the words
Courtesy of Rigel Voss
in looping copperplate. When I saw that, the fear that had been kicking behind my ribs for hours subsided. A weltering sadness swept over me instead. I’d resisted Falcon Eddy, tried to dislike him. But here he’d given his life to try to protect me. I’d miss him calling me “dearie.” I’d miss his big presence in our lives. Another thing for Rigel Voss to answer for.

I sat back on my heels, swept the beam of the flashlight around the barn. No sign of another human presence. I felt alone but for the animals. I heard the swish of Zar’s tail, the bump of Miss May scratching her head against the doorjamb, Zar’s nervous hooves pacing the stall. I switched on the lights, flooding the barn with a nearly miraculous brightness. I couldn’t care less whether I was tipping Voss off to my location. Just knowing he was here for me, finally, filled me with power, and a kind of righteousness. This was my house, my barn, my town, my home. My life. He’d taken enough from me. I was damned if he was going to take more. He’d never have the Book. He’d never have me.

I slid Zar’s stall door open, stepped in. Gave him a hug round the solid muscle of his neck, patted Miss May’s head. “I’m sorry, kids. There’s nothing I can do about Eddy right now. You’ll have to be okay. I have to leave you, but I’ll be back soon.” I kissed Zar’s nose, remembering those were the last words Eddy had said to me: “Back soon.” I leaned into Zar’s neck, smelled his good horse smell. “If I don’t come back, someone will find you. They’ll be here after the storm. If I don’t come back …” I kissed him again and looked into his kind eyes. I threw him three more flakes of hay, and left it at that.

I slogged back into the snow, bolted the big slider, trudged back to the house. It was warmer now than when I’d come out. The snow had stopped, and flashes of what looked like lightning lit the sky to the west. For all I knew, Voss had a gun pointed at me, or was lying in wait for me inside the house. But I didn’t think so. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to play
out, and somehow I knew it. It all became clear to me in that moment, what I needed to do to keep myself alive, to end the craziness, to get my daughters safely back.

He hadn’t been in the barn. He wasn’t in my home. I didn’t need the absence of tracks in the snow to tell me. I didn’t need the Book. I felt for him with my mind. He wasn’t in the Warriner house. That left the church. He would wait until I was beside myself with fear, and then he would come for me. I knew that because I could feel his thoughts now, too. But I kept my own from him as I played the waiting game. Let him think I was terrified.

The lightning flashed again, and rolling thunder followed. I counted. The best I could tell, the lightning strikes were about five miles off. The kitchen lights flickered, went out. I was weary from sporadic, nightmare-laced sleep for days on end. It suddenly seemed like years instead of days since I’d slept soundly.

I needed to stay awake, in control. The barrage of storms, first the heavy snow, now the sudden warming, the lashing rain and lightning, had been blasting Hawley for hours. No phone, lights sporadic, if I was lucky. But I couldn’t think of any of it. I had to stay alert for the coming man. It wasn’t so bad knowing he would come, and that I’d have to kill him or be killed. But at that moment I hated having to stay awake for it.

I drew all the shades in the house. I scooped coffee, poured water I’d collected in all the vases in the house when it seemed certain the power would go. I heated water on the stove and thanked God for the miracle of propane. I didn’t think about anything beyond the steps for making coffee. I went through the motions. I didn’t think about Voss. When the coffee was ready, I poured some and took it like medicine, leaning against the counter in the dark. Listening to the storm howl, I felt more alone than ever in my life. I reached for the Book, near me as always. I opened it and fell toward Jeremy.

This time, instead of the Sea Road, I landed on the catwalk of the Bijoux, far above the stage. Jeremy was below me. He didn’t wear his mackintosh this time, but the elegant white jacket that meant we were performing the show I liked the least,
Restoration
. Jeremy played the great
magician Robert-Houdin, while I was the mystery woman, his muse. The show itself was fine. The only problem with it, from my point of view, was the last illusion, the trick called Without a Net. The illusion that Jeremy thought was my finest, but which terrified me all the same. And here I was again, at the top of the catwalk, without even the harness our prop master Dan used to control my leap, my flight, while I controlled the disappearing and the stunning restoration the show was named for. Not only was I without the harness, when I looked back, I found I was standing on a tiny square of the catwalk that seemed to have disengaged from the rest. A platform hanging in air, with no way down. My heart nearly stopped from fear.

Jeremy waved to me from the stage. “Hello, love.”

I was frozen in place on the very edge of that narrow metal grating, unable to move.

“Jeremy,” I said through clenched teeth, “where’s my harness?” I was afraid even to breathe.

“Oh, that. You don’t need that anymore.”

“Are you crazy? I’ll just go splat on the stage if I jump.”

I could see even from that height he’d assumed the look of infinite patience that I’d always found acutely irritating. “Actually, you won’t.”

“Does this dimension, wherever we are, not have
gravity
?”

He looked around. “Well, we’re just in the Bijoux, which I
think
still has gravity. But sweetheart, you’re missing the point.”

“Look, Rigel Voss is outside, coming to kill me any minute. I have to figure out what to do. And you’re not helping!”

“No. I’m only here to make suggestions.”

“Well, if this is a suggestion, it stinks!”

“That’s my girl, good and stubborn. It’s your stubbornness that makes you my bet in any fight. You’ll never give up, even when backed into a corner. That’s when you’re most creative. Now, all you have to do is make the leap.”

“And I suppose you’ll catch me?”

“No. As ever, you won’t need catching. You can do this, my darling.”

I looked down. The stage seemed tiny from that height. All reason told me I would die if I jumped.

Jeremy called up to me, “It doesn’t take reason, love. It takes faith in yourself.”

“I’m a little short on faith right now.”

“Then get some help.”

“There’s no one else here, you idiot!”

“Hmm. I prefer ‘wanker.’ ‘Idiot’ is a bit harsh, don’t you think? And it’s not exactly true, that no one else is here. I believe in you. And Caleigh does.”

“Caleigh’s with Nan.”

“Well, I know that. But she’s with you, too, as I am.”

I felt for the string, still in my pocket.

“Just try the first pattern you taught her. What was it?”

I thought about it. “ ‘Witch’s Broom.’ ”