Dead Willow (12 page)

It was the same portrait Jess had seen hanging in the alcove at the
Rusty Gate
.

This made Josiah Pembry seem much more dead, much more of a ghost than she had made him out to be. She was having a harder time fitting the man from the ice cream shop into this picture, even with the mole over his eyebrow.

This was stupid! What were they trying to prove? Josiah Pembry was dead …

Maddie turned the page.

… and Eunice, it seemed was missing.

There was a single column below the fold on Novembe
r of ‘64.

“Eunice Louise Pembry
, recently widowed of Lieutenant Josiah Pembry, Department of the Ohio, is missing from the Pembry home these last several weeks. Local authorities conducted a search of the Pembry farm, where upon food was found rotting and cold ashes in the wood stove. The livestock animals evidenced neglect, suffering from malnourishment. The farm is shackled by order of the sheriff. Anyone possessing knowledge of the whereabouts of Eunice Pembry need contact the Jackson county sheriff’s office immediately.

“So, Eunice, what … just walked off into the sunset? That doesn’t make sense.”

Maddie flipped to the next page of scraps, and this one was a hodge-podge of different clippings with no particular focus. The librarian helped her to zero in, pointing from one article to another.

“These are all from 1870,” she noted, as a pattern started to crystallize for Jess. “Burglaries of stores and homes. Clothing, food, blankets … all things a transient might take.”

“You’re thinking that Eunice came back?” asked Jess.

“If she did, then where had she been for five years?” asked Maddie. She had obviously played this puzzle a lot more than Jess.

“Was she seen?” asked Jess, her gears turning.

“No, just the things taken. The only clue was women’s clothing. At first, only women’s clothing.”

“At first?”

Maddie turned the pages.

“After a while a lot of other things started disappearing. Some of the clothing was men’s, and there were other things, too. Tools and … weapons. The locals knew that the group responsible was living somewhere in the thick woods on the Pembry property, but they could never find them. The thieves only took bits and pieces, making an all out search for them more trouble than it was worth. In the end, no one was really sure how much was taken, or how many of them there were.”

”I’ve got clippings off and on for about twenty years. By then, it had been almost thirty years since anyone had seen Eunice Pembry. She could have walked right down the main street of town and no one would have batted an eye.”

“Did she?” Jess asked, starting to ride the edge of her seat.

“No … but Cyrus Randell did.”

Jess cocked an eye at Maddie. “Who the hell is Cyrus Randell?”

Maddie flipped to the next page, with a picture of the broken-down Pembry farm. Standing in front was a man and his family, a wife, two young sons and a baby daughter.

“Cyrus Randell bought the Pembry farm from the county in the spring of 1890. By then, it was mostly an overgrown pile of shingles and wood siding. The elements hadn’t been kind, and much of the lumber had sprouted legs and walked off in the twenty-six years since Eunice herself had walked off. Cyrus got it for a song and started building his church.”

The word had almost slipped by, and then it stuck. “Wait … church? You mean he was …”

“Cyrus Randell was
Reverend
Randell. He started out as a Methodist minister in his younger days, but apparently the church didn’t see eye-to-eye with his ‘methods’. He was de-ordained, or de-frocked, or whatever it is you call it. So, he moved out here with his family and decided he didn’t need the backing of an actual church to do his preaching. He wasn’t too far off the bead, according to the stories. He didn’t mess with snakes or smack people on the forehead, but he wasn’t above speaking in tongues when the spirit moved him. Garnered himself a modest congregation in the roughly ten years he was here.”

“What happened to him?”

Maddie turned to the next page.

Jess’ eyes got round. Even a
Xerox copy of an old, grainy microfilmed photograph couldn’t soften the impact of what she was seeing. It was wrong, she thought. They should never have printed this in a newspaper.

The image was of the burned-out husk of a small country church. The white-wash paint on the outside clapboards was still glistening white. Only the edges of the window frames were charred, as were the seams around the door. The heat had punched through the roof like the top of a birthday cake, the sunlight streaming into the center of the sanctuary. If only the picture had stopped there.

Jess pulled her eyes away and forced herself to read the copy. Words she could handle.

The church had gone up during a Sunday evening service. It was the dead of winter and the shutters had been latched securely. What the parishioners did not know was that the church doors were also latched, and padlocked. The kerosene lanterns used to illuminate the hymnals were found smashed on the cast iron wood stove used for heating. It was believed that Cyrus Randell himself had lit the bonfire that ended all their lives.

Jess looked again.

The fathers and mothers and children were stacked like cord wood at the church doors. Mothers had sheltered their young ones in their arms as the heat blasted away the flesh off their backs. Men clawed at the shutters uselessly, their bodies falling in black heaps beneath the window sills. Some even huddled together, perhaps in prayer, as the pews went up around them.

And, slumped over the altar in a pile of ash, a single figure, presumably Cyrus Randell.

He hadn’t been himself lately, a few remaining members had been heard to say. He just hadn’t been himself.

“Please turn the page,” said Jess softly.

Maddie obliged as Jess sat back in her chair and tried to scrub the last five minutes out of her brain. She didn’t need to see that; it was just more questions.

“I still don’t see what all this has to do with Willow Tree,” said Jess, stymied.

Now it was Maddie’s turn to sit back. “What do you think you’ve been looking at?”

“Those are the beginnings of Willow Tree, I get that. I just don’t -”

“No, honey, I don’t think you do get it. Willow Tree started a long time ago, with that cemetery and that big ass tree. It culminated right there,” pointing to her scrapbook, “in the
Rusty Gate
.”

The image of the church ruins was still fresh in her mind, and she overlaid them with thoughts of that rustic inn where she had laid her head the night before. It made her skin crawl.

“Are you saying that Cyrus’ church … is now that inn? That all those people …” Jess swallowed hard. “So, this really was about ghosts?”

“Of a sort,” agreed Maddie.

“But I saw the commendation from the governor in their lobby. It didn’t say anything about a fire.”

“Helps if you’re the one writing the commendation.”

Jess flashed on Eunice’s steely glare coming at her from across the front desk of the
Rusty Gate
, and she found she wasn’t surprised. Those eyes could probably make a politician do just about anything.

“So, Eunice built the
Rusty Gate
on the bones of that congregation.”

“She wasn’t alone. I imagine the county wanted to put that fire behind them as quickly as possible. Even after the rubble had been cleared, there was still a
specter of death in those woods for years. They probably saw Eunice’s offer as manna from heaven.”

“Christ,” Jess gasped, staring at the scrapbook. “When I stepped in this shit, I had no idea it was going to cover my boots.”

“Hell, I was still wading through it when I put it away almost twenty-five years ago. Never did get all the wrinkles out.”

“Like what?” asked Jess, folding her hands on the table.

“Well … like how Cyrus Randell, who by all accounts was a caring pastor of his flock, one day decides to set a torch to the lot of them, his own family included. Now, I don’t pretend to know what makes a man do that, but I do know it cleared the way for Eunice to once again take possession of her ancestral home.”

“Wait. What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just speculatin’. Like I’m speculatin’ about how Eunice stepped off the planet the year after her husband died, only to reemerge forty-three years later flush enough to buy back her ancestor’s land. Ancestors, by the way, who should not exist.”

“Hey, hold on,” said Jess, getting into it. “You can’t know for sure that Eunice never had any children. I mean, for all we know, Josiah might have done the deed before he went off to war. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Okay,” argued Maddie, ready to play the game she had played many times before, “then, where was she? Where had little Eunice Jr. been? She’d be around thirty-five at the time of the sale. There were no birth records. They did a census in 1900, nothing there. And, yes, I checked that ancestry website. There was no Josiah Jr. either. So, who birthed the Eunice that birthed Eunice, and so on?”

“Surely they would’ve checked during the land sale. Wouldn’t it seem a bit odd to have two Pembrys on the same deed?”

Maddie shook her head. “There was no reason to tie her to the Eunice of old. There were no such things as forensic accountants back then. The land she bought belonged to Cyrus Randell, not Pembry. The more cash you had in the bank, the fewer questions were asked. She promised them a shiny new bed and breakfast, and she made good on the deal. You can attest to that.”

“It’s hardly a little bed and breakfast anymore.” A sunbeam caught Jess’ eye. The light was beginning to stream through the west windows. She checked her phone. If she was going to make it back before dark, she needed to leave. She wasn’t that anxious to get back to the
Rusty Gate
anymore, but …

“I’ve got a room waiting for me in that cozy little bed and breakfast, so …”

“Yeah,” said Maddie, looking toward the stacks “I’ve got some dust to move around, so …”

As Jess turned to leave, she took one last look at the thing on the table. It was just an old scrapbook, wasn’t it? It didn’t mean anything, not really.

Jess took a deep breath and tried to massage the wrinkles from her forehead. “So … what we’re saying here … and I just want to hear myself say it … is that Eunice Pembry is almost 150 years old.”

Maddie never cracked a smile. “Well, that’s just crazy talk, now isn’t it?”

Jess thought that was the first sane thing that Maddie had said all day.

He would never have actually seen the sun, had it not been for the woman.

Willow felt the sun’s rays like stabbing knives into his eyes, a simile he now shared with her. Pain, as a concept, he understood, but as a sensation, it was agonizing. It was the same heat and cold and thirst and hunger he had experienced in the ground, but bark was not skin, and limbs and roots were not arms and legs.

How did these humans survive in these extreme conditions? And not simply survive … but thrive. Willow was feeling threatened even as the warm sun touched raw skin and the blustery wind rippled tiny hairs on arms and back. The more of the woman that cleared the soil, the more the sensations flooded his thoughts and feelings. Each finger clawing dirt, each muscle pulling for the surface like a swimmer through water, brought new dangers for which he was not prepared.

But, the woman was prepared.

The primal urge to breathe air and feel sunlight and stand freely on two feet drove the woman to battle her way up out of the ground. The sensations that Willow thought unbearable, she saw simply as the cost of doing business.

It was not a feeling that was familiar to him, but the skin-crawling paranoia that made him want to draw up into a ball, the woman identified as shame, and she was fighting it. The more skin that was exposed to their surroundings, the stronger the pull to sink back into the protective earth. Words like
nakedness
and
immoral
and
indecent
clouded his vocabulary. They seemed to serve no purpose other than to confound his progress, but he couldn’t deny their power.

He. She. There was also an undeniable purpose in these words, a power. And, though the woman was female of this species, Willow did not identify himself with her. Yet, he
was
her. It was to be a complicated transition.

The woman … or was it him? … snapped roots and tendrils from the new flesh as it, as
he
, emerged from their interment, patches of soil and worms and leaves clinging to its nude form. Her arms wrapped protectively around as a cold blast reminded them of their vulnerability. They could not hide beneath the tree much longer.

The woman remembered the path that had led her from the desolate town to the dark shelter of the giant willow tree. They took a tentative step from the tree, then another. Her feet settled into the soft loam with each hesitation.

The Willow was not going back.

He pressed forward until she crept out from under the shade of the tree and felt the stark rays of the sun on his bare skin. The paranoia fueled their rush to the safety of the next pine or dogwood or scrap of sagebrush that lined the footpath into town. The trail was overgrown, and Willow wondered if the woman was the last one to have used it. He had been preoccupied with her, and had not sensed another presence. Perhaps the town she remembered was long deserted.

Her legs ached from running and crouching. Scratches drew tiny lines of red on every part of her. These new feet were unaccustomed to running barefoot over rocks and brush, and bloody footprints began to follow them along the trail. Then, she saw it up ahead.

The home was no more than a rough hewn cabin at the edge of town, but wisps of smoke twisted into the air from the crooked stovepipe in its roof. What caught the woman’s eye were the clothes hanging to dry on the line in back. There were more clothes than need be for one person, which meant there were likely women’s clothes as well as men’s. This also meant that there were more people who might see the naked woman stealing from their backyard.

The woman looked to the west, at the warm fireball which turned red as it settled behind the trees. There would soon be less light, and many a thief could slip about in the shadows that remained. If only the cabin’s tenants would leave their laundry hanging for the night.

Willow felt the woman’s fear of a long night with no covering, and he caught her frustration at having no control over this outcome. She was used to being in control of her life, and of the lives of others. She believed control had been stolen from her with the death of her mate, and now the dice were rolling again. To rely on fortuity for her very life was intolerable. She could not conceive of such an existence. The springs of will coiled tightly within her, and Willow began to sense that he was only along for the ride.

The woman made her move in the faint glow of the dusk. Clothing, cool but dry, was snatched from the line as she passed through their backyard in a blur. She was swallowed up by the dense woods as they, the Woman and the Willow, made for the property she had occupied with her husband. She knew of places in those woods where they would never be found. They could hide in those place while they thought of what to do next.

Willow could feel the hunger of the woman rumble deep within him. But, she knew where food could be found, and other things. It was a long night ahead, and they would soon take a trip into town. She sent a wave of calm through his bones and sinews. She was, after all, in control.

As the woman plotted and planned, Willow became aware of a rumble of his own. The soil beneath his tree quivered with energy, and he knew why. The rising of the woman had set a thing in motion. Soon, there would be more. Men and women would crawl from the dirt, and Willow would draw them here. The woman would clothe them and feed them and lead them, and Willow would give them life.

And, in time, Willow would roam the earth.

He was, after all, in control.