Strange Country (8 page)

She stopped at her father’s on the way back to Pabby’s—hers, almost hers, but it felt disloyal or ungrateful to think of it that way. Pabby would have told her she was an idiot. If I hadn’t wanted you to have it, I wouldn’t have left it to you, she’d have said.

Of course, whether Hallie thought of it as hers or not, the neighbors would refer to it from now until eternity as the old Pabahar place, even if it had a hundred owners between now and then.

Her father was out somewhere when Hallie let herself into the house, the storm door ushering her into the familiar scents of old boots and straw and coffee. She went into the back room and pulled three packages of steaks from the freezer, since her father hadn’t remembered to do it. Then she wrote a quick note—
Took the steaks, see you at 7
—and left.

It wasn’t noon yet as she pulled back onto the state road, but so overcast that it felt like late afternoon with dusk approaching. A pickup with a dual rear axle and a light bar that looked brand-new passed her, and she could see the lights of another car maybe half a mile back, but otherwise the road was empty. She didn’t pay much attention, couldn’t stop the progression of thoughts—Prue and Death and the note she’d gotten that morning. Laddie too. None of it the same thing, but none of it a problem she could solve the way she liked to solve problems, by running straight at them.

As soon as she turned into the driveway, she saw it, something fluttering in the breeze like a trapped bird. Same spot—hell, the
exact
spot—where the note had been that morning. Same fence post—or, at least, another fence post that looked exactly like. She slowed, then stopped, sat with the engine idling and looked at the post, at the surrounding fields, all the way up to the house and the barn. Nothing moved. Nothing except that damned note on its post.

She left the truck running and got out, carrying the prybar from under the seat.

It was the same as before: heavy paper, note lashed to the fence post with baling twine. Despite the overcast, she could read this one fine right here.

FACE YOUR FEAR.

And then the coordinates. The same set as before—+43° 46' 22.85", −102° 0' 17.38".

What the hell? No, really, what the hell?

She hadn’t decided if she was going to take it or if she was going to leave it right there and see what happened, when she heard a car slow on the road and turn up into the drive.

She grabbed the note off the post, watched the post crumple into dust again, stuffed the note in her jacket pocket, and kept hold of the prybar as she stepped to one side so she could see who was approaching.

The car, a thirty-year-old gold Buick with a vicious dent in the rear passenger door, stopped behind Hallie’s pickup; the engine turned off, then dieseled for a moment, like it was trying to come back to life on its own. Which wouldn’t surprise Hallie, because it turned out things did come back to life. Hell, she’d come back to life. But this was just a car. Probably. It was probably just a car. Sometimes things actually were just the ordinary things they appeared to be.

On the other hand, she’d just received a note that had come fastened to a post that no longer existed. And if she’d learned anything from Afghanistan, from Death, from Martin Weber, it was that it paid to be prepared.

The car door opened. Beth Hannah stepped out.

Beth Hannah, sister to Boyd’s murdered wife, Lily.

Beth Hannah, Death’s daughter.

Who’d been stalked by a reaper and who’d turned to Boyd for protection.

Hallie hadn’t seen Beth in months, not since the reaper, Travis Hollowell, had come out of the under to find her, to convince her to marry him because marrying her would make him human again. And immortal. Because Beth, and Lily, who’d been married to Boyd before she’d died, were Death’s daughters. Marrying one of them conferred immortality on their spouse—sort of.

Beth had disappeared after the final confrontation, after Hallie had stopped Travis Hollowell, after Lily and Pabby had rebuilt the wall between the worlds. Boyd looked for her, put out calls to sheriff and police departments all over the country. But he hadn’t found any trace of her. Beth was maybe not precisely the last person Hallie had expected to see coming up her driveway on a dry, cold March afternoon, but she was pretty damned close.

She was recognizable and yet, she looked different from the last time Hallie had seen her—hair still curly but pulled back into a tight ponytail, black jeans, black T-shirt, hiking boots, and a black hooded Carhartt jacket. She had dark makeup around her eyes so that the irises looked darker and larger. She had a messenger bag slung across her chest and black biker’s gloves on her hands.

“What are you—? Where have you been?” Hallie asked.

“I need your help,” she said, just like that, no preamble, not hello or What have
you
been up to? or even, How did it all turn out, there, at the end?

8

They entered Prue Stalking Horse’s house through the side door, which was a relief. Not that Boyd wouldn’t have walked in the front, past the spot where Prue had lain on the hard porch floor and died. He’d have done it. He was a master at pushing things down and moving past. It was what he did.

Some days, though, pushing things down and moving past was exhausting.

The kitchen looked almost the same as it had the previous night. The gloomy winter sky outside cast shadows underneath the counters, but Boyd could see that on a sunny day, it would be warm and welcoming.

They heard heavy footsteps, and a moment later, Ole emerged from the cellar. He nodded at them in greeting and crossed to a short counter near the door where he retrieved a big steel thermos. He poured coffee, still hot enough that Boyd could see steam rising, into a collapsible cup, then offered coffee to each of them in turn by the simple expedient of holding the thermos toward one and then the next in his large hand. He drained his cup in one long swallow, wiped a hand across his mouth, and said, “You better take a look.”

He gestured for Boyd to go first, like he wanted his impressions of the cellar and whatever was down there without Ole or Agents Cross and Gerson interfering.

The basement was really a cellar with dirt floors and stone walls, cold and damp even now as winter shifted over into spring. Light came from two naked bulbs, one directly at the bottom of the stairs and another just to the left of a big furnace that must have been at least fifty years old. The two bulbs cast weak yellow light on the dark walls and floor.

Past the furnace and a small stack of old cardboard boxes darkened by age and probably by the dampness in the cellar was a single work light clamped to a floor joist, the white cord running down the wall and across the cellar to an outlet attached to another floor joist near the stairs. Boyd approached, noting that the floor was uneven beneath his boots.

A pickax and a shovel were leaned up against the long wall. Someone had dug a shallow pit, maybe a foot deep at most. Inside, clearly though not completely exposed, were the remains of a human skeleton.

Boyd looked at Ole, who was standing just behind him at the bottom of the stairs, Cross two steps up, and Gerson halfway down.

“A body?”

Ole still didn’t say anything, his mouth set in a grim line.

Boyd stepped forward and crouched by the pit, taking a moment to study the exposed parts of the skeleton carefully—half the skull, the arc of a collarbone, the upper portion of the rib cage, the left ulna, bits of both the right and left hand, and what he took for the right femur. In the dirt just to the left of the lowest exposed rib, but also in the dug-out pit, was a disturbed bit of earth and what looked like chunks of newly mined coal, gray and dark. He almost reached out to brush the dirt from the area, but stopped himself. Instead, he got up, unclipped the work light from the overhead floor joist, squatted back down in a slightly different location for a better view. He tilted the light to shine on the spot he wanted to inspect. Something shone back at him. Three somethings, he realized as the lamplight shifted, spaced like an equilateral triangle. Not clumps of dirt or even coal, but something that reflected light, like glass or gemstones.

“What—?” Before he could finish the sentence, there was a bright flash of light big enough to fill the cellar and momentarily blind him. As it faded, Boyd heard a rumble of thunder as if from a long way off. He stood, quick enough that he stumbled.

Ole put a hand under his elbow. “Okay?” he said.

Boyd blinked against the afterflash. His heart pounded like a roar in his ears. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t even breathing hard and he didn’t think his heart was beating too fast—just loud. It felt as if there was still something there, something unseeable in the cellar with them.

“What was that?” Boyd asked. No one answered.

Ole frowned at him, something resembling concern on his face. “What was what?” he asked.

Cross, intent on the bones, stepped past both of them and crouched in the same spot Boyd had been a few seconds earlier. Gerson had stepped back, against the stone wall, one hand on her chest. She looked at Boyd, looked back at the bones. She drew in a visible breath, reached into her bag, and retrieved a notepad and pen.

“We need an evidence team,” she said. “I’m sure your people are good.…”

But they’re not trained for this, Boyd thought. Or, they were trained for bones and bodies and even for small objects buried in dirt. But they weren’t trained for things that appeared to be clumps of dirt but reflected light instead; they weren’t trained for bright flashes of light everyone didn’t see. Neither was he.

“Already called,” Ole said. “But I wanted to make sure you saw this. What the hell?” he said, to himself mostly, Boyd thought. “What the hell went on here?”

“They need to pay attention to those stones beside the body,” Boyd said.

Ole frowned. “What stones?”

Boyd ducked his head to move past Cross, who looked up at him and then grudgingly rose and stepped around the bones to the darker side of the cellar.

Boyd crouched again and pointed. “Right there. What are those? At a glance they look like dirt clods, but they’re not and there’s something—” He stopped, not sure what to say about them. Ole had never said anything about any of the things that happened in Taylor County last fall—not about Martin Weber or his blood magic, not about Travis Hollowell, the reaper, who had killed Boyd’s wife and, at the end, almost killed Boyd. He had never said anything about Uku-Weber and the destruction there, at least nothing beyond—yeah, hell of a gas leak. Nothing. About any of it. So what was Boyd going to say now? That he’d seen a flash of light, heard thunder while Ole and, he was pretty sure Cross, had seen and heard nothing?

He glanced toward Gerson. He wasn’t sure about Gerson.

“Something in particular about them?” Ole asked. He appeared to be studying the bones, not looking at Boyd or even—at least on the surface—trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about.

“I don’t know,” Boyd admitted, because he really didn’t.

“We’ll bag ’em with the rest,” Ole said.

“No,” Gerson said.

“They could be evidence,” Boyd said.

“I’m sure they will be,” Gerson said evenly. “I’ll take charge of them.”

“What?” Cross moved back into the light. “No. This is a murder investigation. We agreed. There’s a procedure.”

“We’ve had this discussion before,” Gerson said coolly. “Some things are outside the scope of regular procedures. I saw something a few minutes ago—a flash of light—as, I expect, did Deputy Davies here.” She indicated Boyd with a brief nod. “You didn’t see it. The sheriff didn’t see it. I can’t ignore that.”

Cross made a sound like a snarl crossed with a groan, pushed past Boyd and Ole, and went back up the stairs. Near the top, he said without turning back, “I have nothing to do with it. I’ll be upstairs.”

“Becky knows a little something about this sort of thing,” Ole said to Boyd after Cross was gone.

“Becky?”

“Special Agent Gerson.”

Gerson smiled for the first time. “Not much,” she said. “You hear things from other investigators or at a conference. Something happens on an investigation. You look into it. And sometimes, if you’re open-minded, you learn something new. Ole’s told me about the things that have happened here. He says you’ve been involved.”

Boyd looked at Ole. He looked at the skeleton, at the small objects—he’d call them stones until he knew differently—nearly buried in the hard-packed earth of the cellar, tried to understand how this had suddenly become part of an actual police investigation. He’d always separated it in his mind—the dreams he had, the things that had happened to him and to Hallie, and police work. He needed them to be separate. He needed the daily routine of police work to counteract the unpredictable chaos of his dreams and Hallie’s ghosts, of the under and blood magic. He needed something that was knowable.

But here they were.

“What will you do with them?” Boyd asked. “With these … stones or whatever they are?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” Gerson admitted. “The sheriff says you’re good with details, that you notice things. Would you be willing to take one? Tell me what you find? You saw and heard what I saw, correct?” Boyd nodded and Gerson continued. “There aren’t many sources of information about this sort of thing, though I have access to a few. We need to use everything we’ve got, all avenues. Right now, you’re one of those avenues. If you’re willing, I’ll sign one of the stones out to you. We’ll have a paper trail. And I’m confident you’ll bring it back.”

It wouldn’t be an official paper trail, Boyd thought, couldn’t be. What he and Gerson were doing would interfere with the official chain of evidence. On the other hand, it was clear the bones had been in the cellar a long time. Maybe they were in the cellar before Prue had moved in. Maybe they had exactly nothing to do with her death. Or maybe they were the key to everything. Either way, Boyd wanted to know. It was a puzzle. Several puzzles. What were the stones? Why were they in the cellar? What did they have to do with Prue Stalking Horse? With the bones they’d been placed beside? With magic?