The Hungry Dead (29 page)

On Friday afternoon Morgan Drey drove through Cherry Hill slowly, looking for a place to eat and a place to stay. After a couple of futile stops, he found that the hotels were booked solid and other places of business, including restaurants, were closed from twelve till three, the hours during which Christ was crucified two thousand years ago. This was the Bible Belt. It was only two o'clock. Not many pedestrians were on the streets, but Morgan noticed quite a few parked cars with out-of-state license plates. Feeling strangely about it, he realized that Cynthia's prattle about a congregation must have a basis in reality; the booked-up hotels and out-of-state cars meant that a large number of people had materialized in this out-of-the-way West Virginia hamlet for the “services” Cynthia had talked about so proudly.

On the outskirts of town, Morgan spotted something called Bob and Dot's Motel, a row of ten plain yellow-brick units in no discernible architectural style, set back off the road in a gravel lot adjacent to Bob and Dot's Bar. There didn't appear to be a motel manager's office, so Morgan assumed that guests registered in the saloon. Six automobiles, four with out-of-state plates, were parked in the lot opposite six of the motel units, so maybe there was a vacancy. Morgan went into the saloon to find out. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he still had an hour to go till he could get a couple of hamburgers and some black coffee, unless Bob and Dot were radical enough not to observe Good Friday.

There was nobody in the saloon except the bartender, a grizzled, sour-faced old man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, who was hunching over the bar reading a newspaper. He looked up at the wall clock as Morgan walked in. “Can't serve you till three, Mister,” he rasped disapprovingly, as if Morgan had committed a sacrilege by merely having food on his mind.

“I'd like a room in the motel,” Morgan told him placatingly, not looking to get into an argument. “If possible.”

The old man snorted. “Why in heaven's name wouldn't it be possible?” he said irritably. “Didn't you see the vacancy sign?” he smacked his hand on the bar belligerently.

“Yes, but that doesn't always mean there is one,” said Morgan.

“Ten dollars a night, Mister. Take it or leave it.”

“I'll take it,” Morgan said. He paid in advance and without a word of thanks was handed a key to unit six. He didn't ask about the possibility of food and coffee later, not wanting to prolong his conversation with the feisty old man. He had noticed a menu of items such as chili, stew and Southern fried chicken posted above the bar and hoped these things would become available after three.

He parked his car in front of unit six and unlocked the door. Surprisingly, the accommodations weren't bad. The bedroom was clean and there was even a color TV. The bathroom had a glassed-in tub and shower, which was what Morgan was most interested in. After throwing his suitcase on the bed, he got undressed and took a long, hot shower. While the water beat against the nape of his neck, he thought about Cynthia. Now that he was this close to her, his trip to Cherry Hill seemed wildly foolish. Maybe he should get a good night's rest and drive back to New York, keeping it to himself that he had ever been so impetuous. Anybody who found out about this would laugh at him. Cynthia would probably laugh when he encountered her. What did he expect her to do—fall in love with him? Such things only happened in the movies. In real life these escapades ended in embarrassment and rejection, not in stealing the bride from the altar as Dustin Hoffman did in
The Graduate.
But Morgan knew he would not turn around and go home. Something inside him always made him see each misadventure through to its vainglorious conclusion. As an anthropologist he was scrupulously logical and rational, but his personal life was often ruled by a flamboyant, quixotic streak he had never been able to repress; sometimes he told himself this was what made him a human being, although a flawed one, rather than a cold, formidable, unapproachable scientist, like several of his more staid colleagues.

Two days ago he had gotten absurdly drunk in the Greenwich Village bar next door to Cynthia's shop, and had allowed himself to be picked up by a prostitute, on the theory that it would be good therapy. He had spent the night with her, falling asleep leadenly after a determined effort to blunt his passions and take the edge off his nutty impulse to hop in his car and drive six hundred miles to see Cynthia uninvited. When he awoke in a hotel room, the prostitute was gone and he was badly hung over. But he filled himself up with pancakes and coffee and drove all the way down through Pennsylvania in one day. Last night he had stayed in a hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, and today he had driven the final two hundred miles to Cherry Hill. He was so tired his nerves were on edge, and he couldn't help having some severe trepidations about the outcome of all this. He still didn't know exactly where Cynthia lived. He had checked a telephone directory in one of the filled-up hotels where he had tried to get a room, but there was no listing under her last name. His idea was to freshen himself up, get some food into his stomach, and ask around town after three o'clock, when the merchants reopened their doors.

Lying on his bed in T-shirt and shorts, he fell asleep watching television, and when he awoke it was almost four o'clock. He got into a sweater and slacks and combed his hair, then crossed the parking lot to the bar and found it lively. He liked the smells of coffee, French fries, and chicken. The old man who had checked him in was nowhere in sight, and a much younger fellow was behind the bar, waiting on half a dozen customers. Several tables and booths were filled, too. Country and Western music blared from the jukebox.

Morgan sat on a barstool, purposely sandwiching himself between two men with whom he might be able to strike up a conversation. These men didn't look like Cherry Hill residents; instead, they might be out-of-towners here for Cynthia's services—part of her congregation. If so, they would know how to get to her place.

The bartender, a stocky, bald-headed man in gray work-clothes, took Morgan's order for chicken, French fries, cole slaw, and black coffee; it was more than he wanted to eat, but he figured that if he had a substantial meal to linger over it would give him more time to get something going with someone who had the information he was after. In the meantime, trying to be unobtrusive, he checked out the other patrons, who all appeared pretty normal considering the fact that at least some of them were probably indulging in fantasies of witchcraft, sorcery and related hocus-pocus. Maybe their idiosyncrasies were harmless. But Morgan didn't think so. To him they represented an aberration, a social retrogression that at best encouraged neurosis, and at worst led to schizophrenia. It might already be too late to rescue Cynthia from her delusions.

When the bartender brought his meal, he inquired loudly, wanting to be overheard: “Do you happen to know a young lady named Cynthia Barnes?”

“Why?”

The bartender's reply was natural and friendly enough, but Morgan had the feeling that conversations at the bar and at nearby tables had come to a halt. “I'm trying to get to her house,” he said, keeping his volume up.

“There's not a Barnes family in town that I can think of,” said the bartender. “Seems like there ought to be; it's a common enough name. But there ain't. If there was, I'd know about it. Not much escapes a fellow's attention in a town this small.”

“How about in some of the outlying areas?”

“Could be, but I'm afraid I can't tell you for sure. Like me to freshen your coffee?”

Morgan nodded his head and the bartender poured from a full, steaming pot. The level of conversation in the place didn't quite seem to return to normal. It was hard for him to believe that his questions could have been this unsettling. Maybe it was his imagination. He was too keyed up to trust his perceptions. He spread butter on a hot home-baked roll and took a bite of it along with a forkful of delicious fried chicken.

“Pardon me, sir,” the man on the barstool to his right said. “May I ask how you've come to know Cynthia Barnes?”

Turning, Morgan saw a slender little man with a handsome, weathered face, neat gray mustache, and slickly parted and combed gray hair worn just long enough to touch the tops of his ears. He was in white shoes, slacks, and shirt, with a powder-blue sport jacket, a gold bracelet on one wrist, a gold watch on the other. His clothes were stylish and expensive looking. He looked like an actor or a doctor, or an actor who might play a doctor on television. Morgan noticed his ring with an emblem of a skull, the eyes set with tiny rubies.

“I knew Cynthia in New York,” Morgan said. “We dated, got to know each other, and she told me about some goings on down here. She invited me to come.”

“How is it you don't have her address?” The man wore a smile but there was no humor in his question. The gentleman next to him was hunched forward on his stool, peering around him to scrutinize Morgan.

It seemed best to continue lying, now that he had already lied about being invited. “She gave me her address before she closed her store in Greenwich Village for the Easter holidays. I have no idea how I lost it, and she doesn't have a listed phone. But I drove down here, anyway. I didn't want to miss out on the things she described.”

“You've been in the store?”

“Many times.”

The man smiled. “Did you ever buy a witch's bottle?” he asked, giving the strange question an air of flippancy.

Morgan said, “Cynthia let me photograph some without buying them—for a book I was writing.”

The man mulled this over. Finally, he stuck out his hand. “My name is Harvey Bronson. My friend here is John Logan. We are chiropractors from Columbus, Ohio.”

“Morgan Drey. I'm an anthropologist. Pleased to meet you.”

John Logan was short and stout, not fat but powerful looking, and as well dressed as Harvey Bronson. Shaking hands with Morgan, Logan said, “I hope you'll forgive us for being careful. Now that we understand you as a friend, we'll be happy to take you out to the Barnes estate with us. It's a pleasant drive, fifteen miles or so out into the countryside.”

“If it's that far, I'd rather follow in my own car,” said Morgan, thinking that he might have to leave by himself if Cynthia made him feel unwelcome.

“Yes, that would be better,” Bronson agreed. He signaled the bartender for another round of cocktails and offered to buy Morgan a drink, but Morgan said no, thanks, coffee was all he wanted.

“Hung over?” Logan chortled.

“You guessed it,” Morgan said, managing a dry chuckle.

The bartender brought two fresh cocktails and Bronson pulled out a wad of bills.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Logan said, then hopped down off his barstool. He crossed the dance floor, in his half-waddling, short-legged gait, to a large circular booth on the far side of the dining area where a group of urbane-seeming men and women were eating and drinking. Morgan's attention remained briefly on Logan while Bronson was preoccupied with paying for the drinks he had ordered. Logan had approached a white-haired patriarchal gentleman, a commanding presence who must've weighed about three hundred pounds and seemed to be in charge of the people in the booth. After a nod of his head acknowledging Logan's presence, the white-haired gentleman remained seated, listening intently while Logan talked to him, apparently imparting information, but they were too far away for Morgan to hear what was being said. When Logan got done talking, the white-haired man replied at some length, his eyes meeting Logan's piercingly, his lip movements clearly defined, as if issuing orders which must not be misunderstood. Morgan could make nothing out from the lip movements.

“Those people in the booth are friends, too,” Harvey Bronson said. “But you can see that for yourself, Morgan.” His eyes twinkled conspiratorially. “The man John is talking to is an extraordinary fellow. A mortician, Stanford Slater, from San Francisco. Perhaps you've heard of him.”

“Can't say that I have,” Morgan said, hoping the admission wasn't a
faux pas.
Bronson merely sipped his gin-and-tonic noncommittally while Logan waddled back across the dance floor and hopped up onto his stool.

It gave Morgan an eerie feeling to be surrounded by people who thought they were witches. He figured that the American Chiropractic Association would be as dismayed by Logan and Bronson and their dabbling in witchcraft as a group of nuclear physicists would be if one of their kind turned out to be an alchemist.

Morgan finished his chicken and French fries and his last sip of cold coffee. Turning to Bronson, he said, “What time are we leaving?”

“I'm ready now,” Bronson said. “How about you, John?”

“Soon as I finish this,” said Logan, gesturing with his drink.

Morgan glanced across the dance floor to the booth on the far side and saw that the patriarchal mortician Stanford Slater and his entourage were on the move, getting up from their table.

“Are they going out to Cynthia's, too?” asked Morgan.

“Yes, of course. We all are,” Bronson replied cheerfully.

“Quite a crowd,” Morgan said, making small talk.

Bronson eyed him appraisingly. “You really find all this a bit silly, don't you?”

It was both a question and an accusation, and Morgan did not know how to take it or what to say.

“Don't worry,” said Bronson, smiling suddenly. “Some of the rest of us aren't totally serious about it, either. But it's fascinating, isn't it? It reminds me of primal-scream therapy—getting all the ugliness out of one's system in one weekend each year. We need outbursts like this, you see—at least some of us do—because our modern age requires us to be too rational, dignified, and restrained. Take me, for example. I can't tell you the number of patients I've had to be nice to, when I felt like twisting their necks the wrong way.”