Devil's Oven (20 page)

Pat was so heavy—even heavier in death, it seemed—that Dwight had to position one of the smaller step stools beside the crate and raise one end of Pat’s body onto it. It took several tries, and Pat rolled more than once off the stool, collapsing in an undignified heap.

When Pat’s body was finally inside the box, Dwight stood up, almost breathless. Pat lay on his side, his face stuck into a corner like a kid being punished. The tarp had slid from around him and now Dwight laid it over him as a kind of blanket, covering him from his head to his feet. He apologized again, but Pat didn’t answer.

As he pushed the box back underneath the stage, and into position beside the others, he tried to think how long he had before Pat started stinking up the place. Two, maybe three days? Everything depended on how serious the police were about going after Bud. It was possible they would tear up the place right away.

Would they bring in tools and lights and that glowing stuff to search for bloodstains? They were likely to find a hell of a lot of nastier fluids staining the floors and walls. People were pigs. There was nothing like working in a strip club to learn that, and fast.

But Dwight could deal with only one thing at a time. He needed to wash up the blood, get rid of the cash, put away the 9mm, take a quick shower in the girls’ dressing room, and change into the extra set of clothes he kept in the office. And he only had about fifteen minutes to do it all.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“Are you all right?”

Tripp was clutching the steering wheel of his truck so hard that his knuckles had turned white. Jolene was worried for him. She didn’t like the way his aura flickered, like the light from an ugly green bulb. He seemed to have lost all his inner strength, all the good and playfulness she had seen in him when she had first noticed him at the club. She hadn’t told him she had been watching him ever since she started working there. He was already skeptical. And she had played a part in that. Showing him her life, her first life, had weakened and frightened him.

She didn’t know everything. She didn’t know why he was as vulnerable as he was. Was it from living on the mountain his whole life? The mountain had nurtured him, but now it was destroying him, just as it had her mother, and others she loved. There was no way to explain to him the dual nature of Devil’s Oven. It was just something she understood. She had understood it the moment it saved her, enfolding her in its warmth, like the once-loving arms of her mother.

“There’s no way they’re here,” he said. “Not Lila. Why would she be at Ivy’s?” He looked at her like he was sure she was lying.

Jolene wanted to touch his face, to try to heal him. Sometimes she could heal spiritual brokenness the same way she could physical pain.

“Because he’ll come back here. He has Lila Tucker. I can feel it,” she said.

“I hope to God you’re wrong,” he said.

“Ivy knows,” she said. “She began all this. She thinks she needs him.”

 “If this really is some kind of monster that Ivy made…shit, there’s no way,” he said. “You can’t sew up people and bring them back to life. She’s going to tell you you’re crazy. You know that, don’t you?”

Jolene shook her head.

“I told you the truth,” she said.

“Bullshit.”

“Ivy has a gift.”

Tripp laughed. “Ivy can sew a seam straight. She has a gift for making pretty clothes.”

Jolene wondered about her own nature. This part of her that lived now, that touched and tasted and sometimes felt happy, or ill, or deeply sad—this part of her needed someone, too. Their coupling in the woods had been necessary for Tripp, so he could be shown the truth. But it had felt necessary for her, too. She was sure she wouldn’t be here long now. She could feel it.

But first, she had to heal Ivy and Thora. Lila and Bud, too. Tripp would be more difficult. She was sorry there were others, like Claude Dixon, who had just been in the way. She couldn’t help them.

“I told you already that you scare the shit out of me,” he said. “I’m here because of Lila. You need to get this thing moving, or I’m going to go look for her myself. And it’s not going to be at that Ivy’s place.”

“I thought you’d believe me by now,” Jolene said. “What more do I have to show you?”

“Stay the hell out of my head,” Tripp said, stopping the truck in Ivy’s driveway.  “Let’s get this over with.”

•  •  •

“He’s been here,” Jolene said. “Can’t you smell it?”

“If there is a
him
,” Tripp said.

They began to search the house.

“No one’s here,” Jolene said after they had combed the back bedrooms. Standing in the doorway of the guest room, Tripp covered his mouth with a sleeve to keep from gagging at the stench.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s like a damn zoo in here.”

They went to the kitchen.

“Wait,” Jolene said. “Where’s her sister?”
Where’s Thora?

She pushed past Tripp and hurried back to the living room. Thora’s three-footed cane stood beside the empty chair, and the tissues and medicine bottles had been cleared from the table. Her stomach went cold.

 
I couldn’t know everything.

“Maybe they went out to eat,” Tripp said from down the hallway. “I sure as hell wouldn’t eat here.”

“The car’s outside,” she said. Her voice was low. Tripp didn’t hear her.

“Or they’re up at that trailer,” he said.

Jolene closed her eyes. She couldn’t feel Thora’s presence, a presence she knew. Thora was need, wrapped in anger and pain. She regretted that she hadn’t touched Thora when she saw her that day. She might have been able to give her some relief from the diabetes ravaging her body. She owed Thora so much. Thora had protected Ivy, maybe even loved her.

Tripp came back into the living room.

“Five minutes,” he said. “And then I’m getting the hell out of here to find Lila. You can walk back to the trailer park.”

Jolene barely heard the door slam. Her mind was seeking Thora.

Thora. Poor Thora.

Thora had been an awkward teenager, but she’d had a kind of stoic charm. Her shy smile as she unwrapped the Christmas robe with her name over the pocket. The beautiful pile of cookies she’d made for the church potluck. She had been so proud. But she had mixed baking soda instead of baking powder into the flour and salt, and they had tasted like medicine. It was a moment that even elicited a rare laugh from her father.  There was a night, a few weeks after Ivy was born, when Thora had come to Jolene crying because a boy had kissed her, but then startled her by trying to put his hand up her shirt. She had run away from him, leaving her coat behind. As soon as she got inside the trailer, her usually composed face crumpled with tears. Her nose and cheeks were red, her fingers stiff from the frigid January night. Those thick, mannish fingers of hers. So cold.

Jolene opened her eyes. She could hear Tripp pacing the porch. He wouldn’t wait.

She went to the kitchen. Ivy had kept it neat even in the midst of dealing with the chaos she had brought on. Ivy the calm. Ivy the obedient.

What Jolene sought wasn’t in the kitchen. She slid open the door separating it from the laundry room.

The chest
freezer sat against the back wall. It had a bolt to which a padlock could be attached, but there was none on it.

She had seen the faces of the dead: the peaceful, the questioning, the faces sculpted in fear or surprise. No one face was the same as another, as though Death required a unique reaction from each victim as payment or tribute.

Even through the stiff plastic, she saw that Thora’s once-bitter face held equal measures of resignation and regret.

For the briefest of moments, Jolene’s face transformed into the one Thora would know well, if she were to wake.
Poor Thora.
Jolene’s heart welled with pity. She put out her hand, wanting to tear away the plastic and lay her hands on Thora, to bring her back, to purge her of every unhappy thing she had ever known or seen.

No. Not yet. Could I ever?

She gently replaced the packages and containers Ivy had arranged over Thora’s body, and closed the freezer.

Ivy, what have you done?

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Ivy didn’t mind being up on the mountain in the dark, but Thora’s grave was only half dug and she was already exhausted. The joints of her hands ached, and the shovel’s handle had given her blisters despite her work gloves. The early rains had soaked the ground, making the first few inches of soil thick and muddy. Worse, the deposits of red-orange clay beneath the soil clung stubbornly to her shovel. No wonder whoever had buried Anthony hadn’t bothered to dig too deep.

Ivy guessed they hadn’t known that the only things that could be hurried on the mountain were frightened animals or streams swollen with rain. To her, Devil’s Oven was like time itself—a permanent mystery, but with rules you could spend a lifetime learning. Some days, she would think of her past—of hide-and-seek games with her mother, of her father’s gruff voice, the arguments with Thora, the hours she spent teaching herself to sew on her mother’s machine—and she was right there, so lost in the vision that she couldn’t find her way out until the phone rang or Thora called for her. Now there was Anthony, and she was in a new time. One whose boundaries she couldn’t see.

Maybe Anthony would live forever. It didn’t seem fair that she should eventually die and he might go on living. But after seeing what he had done to Thora, could she really expect to live that much longer?

She wished Anthony were here to help her. She hadn’t asked him to do any kind of work thus far, and he was a big, strong man. Telling him it was his responsibility to bury Thora because he had killed her wouldn’t work. Anthony had no concept of guilt or responsibility. If he even understood what she was asking, he would probably just smile and do nothing.

It’s not too late.

Ivy’s mother knelt beside her, fastening the layers of net around her waist. She had stitched the net into a white boll of a tutu, and glued flower buds shaped from ribbon all over it. The buds had long ribbon streamers that flew behind Ivy as she ran.

We can make the luncheon, her mother told her. It’s not too late. Don’t mind Daddy.

They walked the two miles to the state motor vehicle office, where her father worked, to get the car. Her father had told them he was sick of the fuss and the tinny music filling the trailer when they put on the practice record her mother had bought from the teacher.I never paid for Thora to do that foolishness
,
he had said.
No, she can’t go.

They snuck the car from its space behind the little shopping center the office was in, knowing her father wouldn’t come outside again until five o’clock. They drove to the Legion Hall in the next town for the luncheon recital, and Ivy danced for the Legionnaires’ wives, wearing one of the silk rose wreaths the teacher had made as a surprise for her and the other girls. The teacher took a photograph of each girl and put it into a cardboard frame as a keepsake.

Walking home later, Ivy giggled and held her mother’s hand. She felt as though she were dancing on a cloud borne by fairies.

The whole adventure remained their secret for weeks, until Thora found the photograph in their room and asked Ivy about it at Sunday lunch. Ivy felt her father’s eyes looking at her over the roast, and, even though she was only five, sensed a wave of grim pleasure from Thora. Ivy started to cry, and her mother squeezed her hand and calmly told her to leave the table. She ran to her corner in the barn’s hayloft and stayed there until dark. It had been Thora’s secret place when she was younger, and Ivy’s mother had fixed it up for her, with gingham tacked to the walls and two big pillows for seats, and a plastic tea set she had bought at a garage sale.

Her parents fought for days. Her mother cried and told her not to worry. A week later, her mother was gone, and Thora found their father hanging in the woods.

It wasn’t too late.

She could still go to the police and tell them about Anthony. She could lie and say he had forced his way into the house and killed Thora. She could say she had been too afraid of him to come forward, that he was the one who had put Thora in the freezer.  They were already looking for him, or at least a person who looked like him. His DNA would be everywhere. Surely on Claude Dixon. Definitely in her house. There was no reason they wouldn’t believe her.

Oh!
The pregnant bridesmaid had seen him! The girl would be her proof.

Even though night had fallen around her, Ivy felt lighter than she had in weeks, or possibly years. If Anthony didn’t come back—and she was certain now he wouldn’t—the burden of Thora’s death
God rest her soul
was suddenly lifted.

Is that what I want? Let that be what I want.

But if the answer wasn’t fully
yes
at that second, she knew it was the right answer. Even though she ached for him, she thought that if she tried, she could bring herself around to turning him in.

She started to fill the hole back in with a new energy, pushing the huge chunks of clay into the hole with her shovel, and then her hands. She worked without stopping for about fifteen minutes before she realized it didn’t matter if she refilled the hole or not. There were no laws against digging holes. Or maybe there were rules about doing it in the state forest. But who would know or care? Packing up, she forgot all about tying a wild rhododendron to the sled.

It was dark enough that she needed the electric lantern she had brought to see her way back to the house. Had she left any lights on? She couldn’t remember.

Would Anthony be there, waiting, wondering where she was? The thought brought on a wave of melancholy. Was it going to be like this? Was she going to change her mind from one minute to the next?

Anthony was cold-hearted. He had no conscience. But he hadn’t hurt
her
; he was gentle with her. And he might come back, after all.