Long Black Curl (7 page)

So she went to the door to her apartment and hollered, “Marshall? Come on out here, and be quick about it, you hear me?”

Her husband emerged, yawning from his afternoon nap. “What's wrong?”

She told him. And then she showed him the fingers.

*   *   *

As Bo-Kate climbed back into the SUV, Nigel looked up from the game on his phone and said, “So, are we staying here at the Bobcat Arms?”

“No, I told you. We're staying at my family's house.”

“I've seen pictures of houses in Appalachia. I'm not sure I know outhouse etiquette.” He paused, then added, “So how did it go?”

“Delightfully. I left her speechless.”

“You showed her the fingers, didn't you?”

“Didn't just show them. I left them with her. Now everyone in the county will know I ain't fooling.”

“Won't the police come looking for you, then? I mean, I know this is the hills and all, but isn't taking body parts, even excess ones, frowned upon?”

“You just trust me, Nigel. What I've got in mind for this dump will blow your mind as much as it will theirs.” She pointed down the highway. “Onward, sir. Our castle awaits.”

*   *   *

Bliss Overbay awoke on her couch. She was confused for a moment, as the dream she'd just been experiencing was so vivid.

She'd been in an airplane, the small single-engine kind with a lone propeller, flying over the mountains at night. She could smell fuel, and sweat, and a kind of hair product once known as pomade, something she recognized from sitting on her grandfather's lap as he taught her chords on her tiple.

She hadn't been alone on the airplane, either. There had been a bespectacled young man, barely out of his teens, seated in the copilot's seat. He'd gotten up and come into the back passenger section to speak with the others. One of those was a middle-aged man whose shoes gleamed even in the dim lighting.

The other, in the cramped confines of the airplane, seemed to be a giant.

His face was broad and strong, with the kind of jawline that defined superheroes in the comics, and he wore a leather jacket that made him look like a thug. But his left leg held her attention—it extended straight out, with only the slightest bend at the knee, and she could see the mechanism of a leg brace under his jeans, and the metal heel loop wrapped with duct tape to keep it from scratching floors when he walked.

She couldn't hear what they were saying over the drone of the engine, but they were smiling, so it couldn't have been bad news. The fact that she was hovering like a ghost didn't strike her as unusual. She frequently had dreams like this, and often found that what they showed her turned out to be true, if you compensated for the malleable dream-language of the images. She once thought it might be astral projection sending her out into the world, but too many times there had been true dream abstractions involved. Now she believed it was like a TV channel that your antenna could pick up only for those brief periods when the atmospheric conditions were exactly right, and even then there was usually some sort of static or distortion.

Then she was traveling outside the plane, flying as a Tufa flew. The night must have been cold, since the bare spots visible on the mountains below were all covered with snow. But she felt nothing.

Then she was looping around the plane in great swirling arcs, coming within inches of the propeller blades. It was incredibly dangerous, because not only did it mean she might get caught on a wing or other protrusion, but the pilot might see her and panic, too. But there was no denying the glorious freedom, this sense of moving with impunity through an element denied to mere humans.

And then a gust of wind blew her sideways into the propeller, and she snapped awake just as the blades began to shred her.

She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and started coffee in the kitchen. As she waited for it to brew, she thought back to the dream, wondering what it was trying to tell her. Had it been a true vision from the night winds, or just her subconscious's free-form choreography?

Just as she thought about calling Mandalay, the phone rang. “Hello?”

“Bliss,” Peggy Goins said, sounding both tense and relieved. “Bo-Kate Wisby is back. And she's … You won't believe what she's done!”

Instantly Bliss put the dream aside. “Tell me what happened.”

 

5

Marshall Goins wheezed with exhaustion, the cold air tightening his lungs with every breath. The hike up to Rockhouse's place was designed to discourage visitors, and he was definitely discouraged. But after seeing the severed fingers, he'd told Peggy he'd go up and check on the old man. So here he was.

He'd gone a secret way, and wandered into something that ended up taking a lot longer than he'd expected. Now he was back on track, and in the grand scheme of the regular world, he'd lost no more than a few minutes. But the Tufa ability to slip in and out of time always took a lot out of him, and lately he'd found the transitions harder and harder. He knew the reason: He'd lived in that regular world so long, and so thoroughly, that it had begun to rub off on him. The Tufa might not be entirely human, but they were close enough that mortality could hum in their ear in many of the same ways.

Then he heard whistling, and stopped to listen. It grew louder, and then Junior Damo appeared on the trail above him, coming down the mountain and jauntily twirling a stick.

He cut off in midnote when he saw Marshall.

“What are you doing, Junior?” Marshall asked.

“Might ask you the same thing,” Junior shot back.

“Might, but I asked you first.”

“Just taking a walk.”

“Good God, Junior, that's the worst lie I've heard this week, and I had to talk to a state senator on Wednesday. But you can save me some trouble. How is Rockhouse?”

“What makes you think I've seen him?”

“There ain't a goddamn other thing on this mountain besides him that could get either one of us out here, that's what.”

“Why do
you
want to see him?”

“Damn it, Junior, I'm not in the mood.” He made a quick, decisive hand gesture, one that asserted his status in the Tufa hierarchy. “Now,
tell me.
”

Junior sighed. “He's been better.” When Marshall glared at him, he continued, “Somebody done come along and cut off two of his fingers. Them extra pinkies he had.”

Marshall kept his face neutral. “Somebody like you?”

Junior held up his own hands defensively. “Not me, man, I swear. Somebody got there before I did.”

“Which brings me back to why you were there in the first place.” When Junior still didn't answer, Marshall shook his head. “Junior, I don't know who'll end up taking Rockhouse's place, but it ain't gonna be you. You don't even scare
me,
and I'm almost as old as Rockhouse.”

“Maybe it ain't about scaring,” Junior said. “Maybe it's about pushing past where we been. Rockhouse wouldn't never even think about that. Maybe it's about time somebody did.”

Marshall blinked in surprise. The same issues had come up among his half of the people, the ones governed by the First Daughters and protected by the Silent Sons. Bronwyn Hyatt, after her stint in the army and her now-famous rescue in the Iraq desert, insisted the Tufa could not continue the way they had for so many generations. And Mandalay seemed to sympathize with that idea, although she'd made no changes yet. “Damn, Junior. That's downright insightful.”

Junior said nothing, but Marshall thought he blushed.

“But I still got to climb up there and see the old man for myself.”

“He ain't much to see.”

Marshall smiled wryly. “He never has been, has he?”

*   *   *

Mandalay climbed down the hill slowly, high-stepping through the drifts stacked by the wind. Whatever lay down in this hollow, just off Skunk's Misery Road and on land owned by the Somervilles, had been calling to her with an urgency that only grew stronger the closer she got. It pulled her off the road and into the forest despite the weather and encroaching evening. She couldn't tell what it was, though; it seemed to exist in a fog of perception, hiding from her by ducking out of sight whenever her mind's eye landed on it.

But now she could tell that it had a tune: “I'm Nine Hundred Miles from My Home.” She recognized it from the few clear notes that cut through the mental and magical noise. She'd heard many versions and with many changes, but the one that always spoke to her most—and that this half-heard song seemed to mimic—was recorded by Fiddlin' John Carson back in 1924.

You can count the days I'm gone

On the train that I left on

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

If that train runs right

I'll be home tomorrow night

Lord, I'm nine hundred miles from my home.

At last she had to stop, exhausted, and lean against a tree. Snow peppered her cheeks and eyes. When she looked around again, she realized she was totally lost: not only did she not know where she was going, but the blowing snow had already filled in her footprints. She couldn't even find her way back.

She dug out her cell phone but got no signal. She tried to listen to the wind, to hear its voice, but there was nothing. Suddenly she was
only
a twelve-year-old girl in the woods, underdressed and disoriented, and the fear that came with that realization threatened to choke her.

What had the night winds done to her?

She began to sing “Babes in the Wood,” a song so spot-on, it made her smile despite the wind, snow, and fear.

Now the day being long and the night coming on

These two little babies laid under a stone.

They wept and they cried, they sobbed and they sighed;

These two little babies, they laid down and died.

She moved around to the back side of the tree to block the wind as much as possible. She stuffed her hands in her jacket pocket, wishing for the umpteenth time that she'd taken her gloves from her school backpack. There was not even a stone for her to crawl under.

She was in serious trouble, all right.

And then she heard a man's voice clearly singing, “I'm Nine Hundred Miles from My Home.”

*   *   *

As he drove back toward town, Marshall Goins tried to ignore the pain in his back and legs. He kept glancing down at his cell phone, waiting for the
NO SIGNAL
message to go away. At last he got a single bar, and quickly hit the name
DEACON HYATT
. After a few rings, the call connected, and a voice said, “Hello.”

“Deacon, it's Marshall. Some shit's hit the fan. I'm on my way to pick you up.”

“Which fan, and which shit?”

“The big fan, and some big shit. Somebody's cut off Rockhouse's extra fingers.”

The line hissed in the lull, and then Deacon said, “That a fact.”

“That's a pure-D fact. I just saw him. He's sitting in his gopher hole crying, Deacon.
Crying
. Blood everywhere. Tried to get him to let me drive him to the emergency room over in Unicorn, or at least have Bliss come up and give him stitches, but he ain't having none of it.”

“Who did it?”

“He wouldn't say. But Peggy told me it was Bo-Kate Wisby.”

Deacon let out a long, low whistle. “That explains why Chloe's been snapping heads off all day. All right, I'll call the rest. Where you want to meet?”

Marshall thought it over. Normally, they met outside, under the sky, but the weather wasn't conducive to that. He said, “I'll pick you up and we'll go up to the Catfish. Pass the word so somebody can bring a propane heater; that way our balls won't freeze off.”

*   *   *

Deacon hung up the phone. His wife, Chloe, seated at the kitchen table working a sudoku puzzle, looked up and peered over her reading glasses at him. “What?”

“I have to go out. Marshall Goins's coming to pick me up. Somebody's done attacked Rockhouse Hicks.”

Chloe's expression didn't change. “I know.”

“That what you been whispering about on the phone all day?”

She nodded. “Peggy Goins told me.”

“Did she tell you who did it?” he asked.

“Bo-Kate Wisby.”

The name hung between them.

“Jefferson back as well?” Deacon asked.

“I don't know.”

Deacon took his heavy coat down from the hook. “That's some bad news for everyone, ain't it?”

“It is. But there's worse. Mandalay's disappeared.”

Deacon stopped in midmotion, one arm in a sleeve. “Disappeared?”

“Last anyone saw of her, the bus let her off after school. She ain't answering her phone. She ain't reachable the other ways, either. Bliss is out looking for her.”

Deacon nodded. Normally these First Daughter matters would stay secret, not just to men but to any women not part of the group. But clearly neither the return of Bo-Kate nor Mandalay's disappearance could remain a First Daughter secret for long, and it was better to share the information than to risk something crucial getting missed.

“You want me to get the boys out to look for her?”

“Not until Bliss says so.”

He scowled. “Might not do to wait. It's cold out there.”

“It's Mandalay.”

“I know, but … I mean, whatever else she is, she's also a little girl. A lot of bad things can happen.”

“I know. But we have to do it the right way. If Bliss doesn't find her soon, I'm sure the word will go out.”

He finished putting on his coat. “All right, if that's the way it is.”

“Be careful,” Chloe said as she stood. “It's awful messy out there, according to the Weather Channel.” She kissed him, and he patted her backside.