The Covenant (15 page)

I described the scene to her as though reading it for the court record. I didn't embellish it or read anything into it. I didn't offer any theories as to what might have happened or try to explain how I had seen her husband alive when he'd been dead for several hours at least. I described how I found Sam in the water and how I tried to rescue him. I told her just enough and no more, certainly no more than she probably already heard from Lorio.

She nodded all the way through my story, never once looking at me through the Kleenex pressed against her face.

“What I saw that afternoon wasn't your husband. I don't know what it was. It's like I told Sheriff Stegall. I can't explain it.” I could be a convincing enough liar when I needed to be. They teach you that in cop school—after hours.

“Thank you,” she snuffled.

“I don't know if this is any help at all.”

“It is. It helps just to know.” She reached across the center console and took my hand, pulled it close and pressed my knuckles to her lips. I could feel her tears hot on my skin. “You've helped me more than you can know.”

She released my hand and unlocked the door.

I left her in the car to finish her cry rather than take her into the shocking rat warren that Deiter called his shop. He answered the door wearing nothing but a pair of plaid boxers and a black army beret. His teeth were still blue from the half-eaten cupcake in his hand. “It's my birthday,” he said.

I pushed inside and closed the door behind me. “And I didn't get you anything.”

“What do I need?” he shrugged, a comically helpless look on his face as he glanced around the room. He seemed to have everything his Teutonic heart desired.

We went into his office. It was his office because that's what he called it. It looked no different than the rest of the shop, which is to say, the dumpster behind a legitimate camera store. After I told him about my stolen car and camera, he dug out his best hand-me-down Nikon, charging me less than half of its retail value because he'd used it a couple times during his sideline paranormal investigations.

Of course, even Deiter's hand-me-downs made my equipment look like a fossil dug out of a tar pit. His camera did everything short of wiping your nose. The handbook weighed more than the camera. I filled out Deacon's check and gave it to Deiter. He dropped it on his desk without looking at it. Two seconds later, I couldn't find it again amid all the clutter.

“I'm including an infrared filter,” he said as he slid a round plastic case into the camera bag. “Use this when you're shooting that Zuber wallpaper. Speaking of…”

He pushed a pile of dirty laundry and a matching pair of Siamese cats out of the chair behind his desk. I thought at first the cats were dead but they tumbled out of the pile eventually and stalked away, tails twitching. “I didn't know you had cats, Deiter.”

“Yah, I'm keeping them for somebody who used to be a friend,” he answered. “Look at this.” He pulled up an image on his computer screen of the antique wallpaper I'd photographed that first day in Mrs. Ruth's house. The images, though still faint, looked as though a couple of decades of dust and cigarette smoke had been stripped away, leaving behind pale blue images of men and women in early nineteenth-century dress, hunters on horses with packs of dogs boiling about their hooves, happy cartoon slaves plowing in the fields, a grinning black Mammy bouncing a little white cherub on her hamlike knee. However, in many places huge brown stains, like the outlines of a topographical map, had nearly erased portions of the scenes, leaving fuzzy images whose shapes could only be guessed at. Deiter said, “This is the best of the bunch, and I could only do so much with what you gave me. The infrared filter should help.”

“What about the other pictures?”

“Useless.” He scrolled through several hazy, overexposed images filled with white bubbles of light that completely obscured whatever it was I had been trying to shoot. “Too much dust in the air. Your flash picks up nothing but blobs. Lots of people in the business call these orbs.”

“What business?”

“Ghost business. Focking amateurs, they tell you these are spirits of the dead, but they're just little specks of dust reflecting off the flash.”

I left that one hanging in the wind, even though I could tell he was dying to hear my ghost stories about Ruth's house. “They're taking the roof apart right now. The air is full of dust.”

“You're wasting your time until they finish.”

“They can't finish until I've shot my pictures.”

He scratched deeply into his straw-colored beard, loosing a blizzard of crumbs down the alpine slope of his naked belly. “You need to keep the dust out of the area you're working.”

“That won't be easy in a construction zone.”

“You could curtain off the room with plastic sheets and duct tape, bring in some fans.”

Always listen to your German engineer, if you have one handy. “I'll try that,” I said, knowing I never would. The house was already a sauna without sealing myself inside a plastic bubble. They'd find my bloated corpse before the first siesta. “Burn me a copy of the best shots. Deacon will want to see them.”

“Already did.” He dropped a disk into the camera bag and zipped it shut. I followed him to the door, along with the pair of cats. They twined back and forth between his feet as he walked, tripping him every other step. He opened the door and they darted out, vanishing into the drought-stricken shrubbery.

“Aren't you afraid they'll get hit by a car?” I asked.

“I should be so lucky.” He glanced past me at Jenny in her SUV. “You look like you're meeting a better class of people these days.”

I snapped a desiccated branch from the boxwood beside the door. “You ought to water your bushes, Deiter. They're dying.”

 

20

E
VERY MORNING DEACON PICKED ME
up at my motel and dropped me off back home in the evenings. He never asked if he could see my room and I never invited him in, even though sometimes I didn't particularly want to be alone. Because I was already so far behind on the job, I worked Saturdays and Sundays, but there was still so much dust in the air from the roof construction that most of my photos ended up hopelessly obscured with orbs. I had to take a dozen shots just to get one I could use.

Then the Nikon broke and Deiter spent two days repairing it. Deacon seemed to take all these setbacks in stride. He never asked to see my pictures. He expected the Devil to throw up every obstacle he could. “It's Satan's job to try to stop me, just like it's my job to push ahead and continue doing the Lord's work. I got nothing against a man trying to do his job. I respect that, even in the Devil.”

While I waited for the dust to settle between shots, I explored Ruth's old mansion, poking into its corners, peering into crannies, opening doors and always finding another door to open, another room I hadn't seen before. All it meant was more work. I began to suspect the house of growing, and pretty soon I came to understand why Ruth fought so hard to keep it. I was starting to dream about the place at night—those nights that I actually slept. When I couldn't sleep, I killed cockroaches and counted the needle scars in my arms.

Sunday mornings when he picked me up outside the motel, Deacon always asked me to go to church, and every Sunday morning I declined. “I will get you one day, Jackie Lyons. And then I'll save you whether you want to be saved or not.” By the third Sunday I wasn't entirely sure he was talking about my soul.

I came to relish those Sundays, with or without him. Construction shut down and the circus camp emptied out about an hour before church, leaving me utterly alone with the house. It was the best time to work, but I didn't bother working. I took excursions into the woods, more often than not getting lost for hours at a time. I rediscovered the cemetery in the woods and spent an hour walking among the gravestones. In daylight, the Stirling family vault looked about as threatening as a garden shed, and since they had broken the lock off the rusty gate in rescuing me, I had no fear of being trapped inside a second time. I found Deacon's friend, the Opossum Paul, scrabbling around in the leaves, searching for converts among the roly-poly gentiles. He poked his apostolic head out and hissed like a radiator.

Enough sunlight slanted through the cracks in the roof to read the bronze plaques fixed above the niches in the walls. The oldest vault belonged to Josiah Overton Stirling, born in 1833, died 1930. His beloved wife Beatrice and four darling children—Murray, Phillip, Mary and Claire—all died within days of each other in 1873, the same year that yellow fever nearly turned Memphis into a graveyard. Beside him lay a second beloved wife, Estella Ruth, who had no birth date but died September 1, 1898, the same day that Caesar Augustus Stirling was born. Caesar died in 2002 at the age of 104 and was interred in the imperial Roman sarcophagus in the center of the crypt, with winged Victories reposed above his bones and naked prepubescent caryatids holding up his marble deathbed.

One name seemed out of place: John Allen Vardry (1918–1942). A bronze plaque, Ruth Stirling Vardry, hung beside his, minus the date of death. When they finally laid her bones here, no more Stirlings would pass that rusty iron grate, as hers was the last and only unoccupied niche in the tomb.

In all my explorations, I never did find Spring Lake. The dry creek that Deacon said would bring me to it led instead to a shallow gully overcome with wild rose and blackberry vines. Most nights around dusk, the neighborhood children would come out and I could hear them playing in the woods until after dark. I tried to find them once or twice but never did. I didn't really expect to.

Late in the third week of my work, I could tell something was going on over in the estates—that's what Deacon's people called the area beyond the forest where the rich people lived. One Friday evening I couldn't find Deacon when it came time for my ride back to the motel. One of his parishioners said he'd gone to see Mrs. Loftin. I borrowed a flashlight and set off through the woods along the now-familiar trail. But this time I must have taken a wrong turn, because it led me out at the base of the levee near the spillway. The neighborhood children were starting up early tonight—I caught snatches of Holly's
wire-briar-limber-lock
song drifting through the trees.

I climbed to the top of the levee, stopped to light a cigarette and blow the cobwebs from my lungs. There were some big houses over there across the lake, big enough to fit two or three of Mrs. Ruth's crumbling white mansion inside and still have enough room to park a private jet. The nearest had a long wooden pier jutting halfway out into the lake. It was lit up with spotlights, and someone had built a stage at the far end and decorated the rails with enough patriotic bunting to float a barge.

Jenny's house sat dark and silent at the other end of the levee. Though it wasn't late, only one light shone in a downstairs window. I noticed then that I was near the spot where Sam Loftin had killed himself. I clicked on my flashlight and walked along the shore, shining the beam down into the water, not really looking looking for anything in particular but looking all the same. All I saw were the same limestone boulders, and the trapped and dwindling pools where a few tadpoles struggled in the mud, and one condom floated like a dead jellyfish beside a smooth, oblong cobblestone.

I got close enough to the house to see that Deacon's truck wasn't parked in Jenny's driveway. There was nothing left to do but head back, so I turned around and walked right through Sam.

I came out the other side of his ghost with an icicle banging around my ribs. He was facing back the way he had just come, from across the levee, and he wasn't waving so much as waving something away. He turned around and walked toward me and I backpedaled, not wanting to experience that level of spiritual intimacy again. He took a few steps, then his head jerked forward and he staggered, then lurched, too quick to avoid, and I felt him enter me again, and again the icy cold and now the additional blind, paralyzing, rush of terror.

He passed through me and was gone, trying to escape the death already inside him, his hands over his head like a man on fire. He dove, but there was no splash, just a profound stillness, the lake below me as black and empty as a well. The flashlight in my shaking hand was dead, its batteries as drained as the woman holding it.

I sat down and began to shake, just like that day when I dove in the lake. It was a cold that went down to my bones, a cold no blanket could warm, a cold worse that the coldest, illest heroin withdrawal on a bare steel bunk in a piss-stained jail.

Sam Loftin hadn't drowned himself and he hadn't died of a heart attack. Someone had attacked him, someone I couldn't see. I'd stood beside him and inside him, been baptized in his fear and shared the moment of his death like a conjoined twin. Never mind the record of hideous crimes I found in his suitcase in the attic, never mind that he died the same day as the daughter he was abusing, never mind how much it looked like suicide, someone had attacked Sam Loftin. I didn't know who, not yet anyway, not unless he decided to show me.

But I would find out. Somehow.

 

21

There are few things … hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery.

— N
ATHANIEL
H
AWTHORNE,
T
HE
S
CARLET
L
ETTER

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY WAS
a Monday. I woke up anyway, showered, brushed the hair on my teeth, and was waiting outside watching the heat rise off the asphalt when Deacon called. I noticed by the clock on my phone that he was late.

“You're late,” I said.