Dark Hollow (5 page)

I’d completed three loops and was beginning my fourth when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I jumped. My hands slipped off the safety bar, and the lawn mower dutifully turned itself off.

I spun around, heart pounding, and Merle stood behind me. He was laughing, and his beer belly shook like bread dough.

“Sorry, Adam,” he apologized when he got his breath back. His meaty face was beet red. “Didn’t mean to give you a heart attack.”

“Looks like you’re about to have one yourself,” I said. “Maybe laughter isn’t the best medicine for you.”

A year earlier Merle had a stent put into his heart, right after his divorce was finalized. It was his second heart attack in as many years. He’d suffered the first one when his wife, Peggy, told him that she was leaving him for her tae kwon do instructor. The guy was twenty years younger than Merle.

Smiling in spite of the scare he’d given me, I wiped my sweaty brow with the back of my hand.

“If I die now,” Merle joked, “then I won’t have to pay any more alimony.”

Merle Laughman lived two houses to the left of us. He was a big, jovial man in his early fifties. He loved to eat, loved to drink, and especially loved to laugh. Given his last name, that was pretty appropriate. He sold antiques out of his home, which doubled as a store because of the zoning laws on Main Street. Years ago the borough had decided to turn our tiny downtown section into an antique row, and now many of the homes were also storefronts. Tara and I had considered doing this ourselves, maybe opening a used bookstore, but we’d never seriously followed up on the idea. In addition to his antique store he had a wood shop out back where he crafted furniture. A little loud, and always ready with an opinion or a joke, but Merle was a good guy, and a great neighbor.

Between Merle’s home and ours was a house that had been converted into apartments, one upstairs and one below. Cory Peters lived in the downstairs apartment. He was a nice enough kid, early twenties, tall and skinny, with leftover acne from his teenage years, as well as a fashion penchant for backward ball caps and letting his jeans fall off his ass. He’d dropped out of college and now worked in the local Wal-Mart’s produce department, where he got us all a discount on our groceries. Cory played too many video games and owned all of the James Bond movies on DVD. He also had the worst fake British accent in the history of the world.

Cliff Swanson lived above him. Cliff was a twice-divorced and now hard-core bachelor in his early forties. He worked at a furniture plant in Baltimore and rode his Harley to work when the weather was nice. Cliff kept the bike in our garage because his landlord didn’t provide storage space on the property. Cliff had a ponytail that made me jealous, a sex life I envied, and a sullen loneliness about him that made me glad for everything I did have. Sometimes I wondered which was better, but I guess it was just subjective.

Then there was Dale Haubner, who lived in the house to the right of us. He was a retired engineer in his early seventies who was always trying to give me story ideas. Tara and I had pretty much adopted him and his wife, Claudine, as surrogate parents. I mowed Dale’s lawn in the summer and shoveled his sidewalk in the winter. Dale and Claudine gave us vegetables from their garden and kept an eye on Tara and Big Steve when I was off on a book signing tour, or in New York on business with my publisher. We had keys to each other’s homes, and Tara and I trusted them implicitly.

It was a nice neighborhood and we had good neighbors. Sure, Merle borrowed movies from me and didn’t return them or sometimes took a joke too far, and Cliff liked to get drunk and then race his Harley up and down the alley, or brag about his wild sexual exploits, and Dale went to work on his yard at the crack of dawn every Saturday, making a lot of noise while the rest of us were still trying to sleep, and Cory had a bad habit of telling people that he knew “Adam Senft the mystery writer” and letting it slip where I lived (Tara and I value our privacy, and a few times people had knocked on our door and asked me to sign books as a result of Cory’s inability to keep his neighbor’s identity a secret). And all of them liked to pick on me at election time, since they were all Republicans and I was a Democrat (except for Cory, who, in the last election, had been hard-pressed to even name either of the candidates or care about the issues). But these were minor things, and despite them, or maybe because of them, I liked my neighbors very much. These days, you’re lucky if you even know the last name of the people who live next door. Maybe you smile and nod when you pass one another, or exchange greetings or small talk, but that’s usually all you do. Our neighbors were also our friends, and I enjoyed living between them. We were a happy little community, there on our corner of Main Street.

Merle’s laughter tapered off into a sigh. He held up two cans of beer. “Thought you might like one of these.”

“You thought right.” I accepted a can. It was frosty and wet, and the sound of the tab popping was music to myears. I drained half in one gulp, and then cooled my forehead with the can. “That hits the spot.”

“Nothing like a cold beer on a warm spring day,” Merle agreed, taking a sip of his own. “And, man, is it warm! Can’t remember when it was this hot, this early. Almost feels like summer.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it does. I hope it lasts for a while, and doesn’t get chilly again.”

“Trust me, it’s gonna be a weird spring.” He took another long sip and belched.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Sure. The
Farmer’s Almanac
says so, and it’s never wrong.”

“You believe that thing, huh?” The
Farmer’s Almanac
was an annual collection of folklore, crop reports, and farming tips that was quite popular in rural towns like ours.

“Sure,” Merle said. “We had a windy winter, so that means we’ll have a warm spring. There’ve been all kinds of other signs, too. That clear, white moon we had last week? That’s a sign. The crickets are out early, and cobwebs are showing up in the grass in the mornings. And my rhododendrons.”

“What about them?” I tried to suppress my disbelieving grin.

“They’re blooming already, and their leaves are completely open. That’s a sure sign of warm weather.”

“According to who—the
Farmer’s Almanac
?”

He nodded. “Yeah, that and others. The old-timers know how to tell these things.”

“By what?” I asked. “Doing powwow?”

Merle winked at me. “Yep. My grandmother did powwow when I was a kid, and she was never wrong.”

I knew all about the art of powwow. Central Pennsylvania is a cultural mixing pot, settled primarily by the Germans, English, and Irish. One of the most prominent beliefs among those people was powwowing. It’s sort of a rustic hodgepodge of white and black magic, folklore, and the Bible. They call it hoodoo down South (not to be confused with voodoo), but here it’s known as powwow. Earlier I told you about when my great-grandmother had me eat a poison ivy leaf, and how I’d never contracted poison ivy since. That was an example of minor powwow. I guess it probably sounds like something out of the nineteenth century, but it’s still practiced today in some of the more desolate corners of the state.

The original inhabitants of our area, the Susquehannock Indians, had a form of shamanism called pawwaw, and when the German settlers arrived they brought their own form with them, a magical discipline of braucherei. Over the years the two mixed and became known as powwow. The belief had its own rulebook,
The Long Lost Friend
by John George Hohman. First printed in 1819, this was the primary bible on which powwow was based. I’d seen a copy in a used bookstore once, but it was expensive and behind glass, so I hadn’t flipped through it. Supposedly the book was derived from many different sources, including the Hebrew kabbalah, African tribal beliefs, German mysticism, Gypsy lore, Druid ceremonies, and ancient Egyptian teachings. It offered a strange mix of cures, spells, and protections. Powwow doctors, who cured their patients using methods from the book, were common in the area up until the late sixties, and even today some of the older residents still visited them before going to a medical doctor.

“So powwow practitioners can predict the weather?” I asked.

Merle shrugged his big shoulders. “I guess. I know my grandma sure could.”

“Shit.” I paused to light a cigarette. “You don’t need to know powwow to do that. My dad got some shrapnel in his leg over in Vietnam, and he used to say that it started to hurt before every thunderstorm.”

“Yeah,” Merle agreed. “There’s always that way, too.”

I ran my hand through my hair and blinked the sweat out of my eyes. “Well, you’re right about one thing: It is hot out here.”

“You’re not getting much writing done today, I guess,” Merle observed, tilting his can of beer toward the lawn mower. “I should let you get back to work.”

“No, it’s okay. I’m not going to get shit done today anyway—mowing or writing.”

“Why’s that?”

I sighed. “It’s been a weird morning.”

There was one of those uncomfortable pauses where the listener clearly wants to know more and the speaker doesn’t want to say anything else. We each filled the silence by drinking our beers.

I prodded the dirt with my shoe. “Merle, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You know Shelly Carpenter, lives over on Forrest Avenue?”

His face brightened. “The girl who jogs by here every morning? The one with the cute ass?”

“That’s the one.”

Merle belched again. “What about her?”

“Does she…does she have a boyfriend, that you know of?”

His brow furrowed. “A boyfriend? Don’t know her that well, Adam. I just watch her butt when she runs by.”

“Oh.” I finished my beer and crumpled the can.

Merle stared at me with a knowing half grin on his face.

“Why? You interested? You gonna be one of those writers that hits the best-seller lists and then gets himself a young chickadee?”

“No.” I bristled. “Don’t be a dick. I just thought I saw a guy in the forest with her this morning. Seemed a little odd.”

Merle stuck an index finger up his nose and pulled outa prize. He wiped it on his shirt and then looked at me. “What were you doing in the forest? And for that matter, what was she doing in there?”

“I was walking Big Steve, just like I do every morning. I don’t know what Shelly was doing. That’s why I asked you.”

“I don’t know, buddy.” Merle frowned. “And I don’t want to know, either.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t want to know who’s sleeping with who on this street. Ain’t none of my business, and it only leads to hard feelings.”

“Merle…” I gritted my teeth. “Knock it off. I’m not having an affair with Shelly Carpenter. Like I said, Big Steve and I saw her with a guy this morning. I was just curious.”

“Don’t know why you go walking in those woods anyway. They give me the creeps.”

I was taken aback. In all the years I’d known Merle, I’d never heard him admit to being afraid of anything other than his ex-wife’s lawyers.

He looked around. “Where is Big Steve, anyway?”

I pointed at the house. “Inside. Probably sleeping under my desk. He’s a lazy thing.”

“Yeah, but he’s good dog. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

I remembered Big Steve’s reaction in the woods earlier that morning.

“Hey,” a voice called across the yard. “You guys need a refill?”

Merle and I both turned around. Dale Haubner walked toward us, carrying three more beers.

“Is this a private party,” he asked, “or can anybody join in?”

He handed us each a beer, which we gratefully accepted. I had no desire to get drunk in the middle of the afternoon, but it was the neighborly thing to do. I checked my watch. Tara would be home from work in a few hours, and I resigned myself to the fact that I probably wouldn’t get any writing done at all. Merle and Dale could both talk, and when they were together and there was beer involved, it was hard to get away from them.

“So, what’s happening?” Dale asked.

“We called a meeting,” Merle said, popping the tab on his can. “We’re gonna evict you from the neighborhood and then rent your house to a sorority volleyball team.”

Dale frowned. “See if I bring you a beer again, you fat bastard.”

Since we were in my yard, we moved over to my outdoor patio. I wrote there sometimes, when the weather was nice. It had a grill and a round table with an umbrella and four plastic lawn chairs. Each of us took a seat and sipped our beers. I flicked cigarette ashes into the yard.

“Hey, Dale,” Merle said, “you know that piece of ass that jogs up the alley everymorning? The Carpenter girl?”

I suppressed a groan. The last thing I wanted was for all the neighbors to know I was asking about Shelly. Something like that would make its way back to Tara and cause all kinds of problems before I convinced her of my intentions.

“Shelly?” Dale propped his feet up on an empty chair. “Sure, I know her. Used to work with her father, as a matter of fact.”

“Is she single?” Merle asked.

“I have no idea,” Dale said. “But you’re a little old for her, aren’t you, Merle?”

“It ain’t for me. It’s for Adam. And besides, I could still get it up for a young girl like that. I get it up every time I see Leslie down at the gas station. I don’t need Viagra, like some people I could mention, you old fart.”

Dale ignored him and turned to me, looking concerned. “Are you and Tara having troubles?”

“No!” I slammed my beer down harder than I’d intended to, and both men jumped in their seats.

“Sorry,” Dale apologized.

“No,” I said again, softer this time. “I was just curious. Saw her with a strange guy this morning and wondered if it was her boyfriend.”

“He was over in the woods,” Merle explained, cocking his thumb in the general direction of the forest. “Walking the dog.”

“Those woods give me the creeps,” Dale said.

Merle nodded in agreement. “I told him the same thing. He ought to take his dog for a walk down Main Street instead.”

“Why do you guys keep saying that?” I asked. I didn’t tell them about my own scare. “What’s so bad about those woods?”