The Witch of Hebron (15 page)

“You sent for me?”

“I thought we might do figures,” Brother Jobe said between sobs.

“Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“I don’t know. I’m so sad.”

“I see you are.”

“I could stand some consolation, I guess.”

“All right, then,” Annabelle said, kicking off her calfskin slippers.

“We just now laid him to rest out in yonder meadow.”

“He was a beauty,” she said unhooking her full skirt and allowing it to fall to the floor. Of course the news of the horse’s untimely death had thundered through the community within minutes of discovery. She untied the ribbon at her throat that secured the top of her shirtwaist. With a little shake, the garment fell open at her bosom. She crossed her arms and pulled it over her head. Brother Jobe emitted a little gasp.

“I hear you know who did it,” she said.

“Maybe I do.”

She shinnied out of a petticoat, leaving her absolutely without clothing.

“Not one of ours?” she asked.

“Mercy, no.”

“One of… them?” she asked, meaning an outsider, a townsperson.

Brother Jobe sighed, a rattling sigh full of phlegm and despondency.

“What are you going to do about it?” Annabelle asked, reaching behind her head to let down her long black hair.

“I can’t bear to dwell on it.”

She shook out her hair so that it fell over her shoulders and flowed down her breasts.

“Maybe it’s better you didn’t just now,” she said.

TWENTY-SIX

“That just screams home sweet home to me,” Billy Bones declared as he and Jasper Copeland beheld an impressive wreck of a house that was denoted on its tilted, rusted mailbox as 2438 Goose Island Road in the drizzly murk of day’s end. The house had been built at the height of the real estate “bubble” years back, in a mélange of styles executed so poorly that it made no particular statement beyond the incompetence of the builders. An excess of roof articulations clearly did not define volumes of space within but rather expressed only a wish to appear more complex than necessary. But it was very large, in the manner of houses built in the final years of the old times. A charred gaping hole on the gable-end roof to the left side, along with the weedy skeletons of milkweeds and mulleins in the yard, and the darkness within, suggested that nobody had lived in the house for more than a little while.

In the old times, people of means built their houses anywhere they pleased. It was not necessary to live close to a town. It was not necessary to follow any rural way of life in the rural places. In the old times, even the few farmers who remained did not put in kitchen gardens. It was not necessary when the supermarkets overflowed with food from all over the world, and a dizzying extravaganza of foodlike products poured out of America’s own factory labs, and the back roads were full of cars taking people effortlessly to indoor jobs that were also effortless, if tedious, and paid princely cash-money salaries. Houses like the one on Goose Island Road were the first to be abandoned when the times rolled over.

Billy Bones and Jasper Copeland were not the first wayfarers to sojourn in the grand house at 2438 Goose Island Road. The deadlock plate on the front doorjamb had been kicked in, the wood shattered. Billy gently shoved the door inward. It swung open with a creak to reveal a foyer more grandiose than grand. The marble floor tiles there lay cracked and broken, with several missing altogether. Water had infiltrated the Sheetrock wall from somewhere upstairs, scattering little heaps of loose gypsum on the tiles. The door blew shut and the room instantly went dim. Jasper fished a candle stub out if his pack and lit it.

“Aren’t you the clever one,” Billy said.

“Lighting a candle in the darkness?” Jasper said. “That’s just common sense.”

“Billy Bones is a creature of moonlight and starlight. What’s common sense to others doesn’t have any magic in it.”

“There’s no moon and stars tonight.”

“Since when you become such a mouthy little bastard?”

“I’m tired and hungry.”

“You’ll have your supper soon enough. Let’s have a look at the accommodations, shall we?”

Squirrels had built a nest in the chandelier that still hung in the foyer, a vulgar thing of dangling mirrored-glass rectangles, colored plastic disks, and swooping arms, overcomplicated like the house itself. To the left of the foyer, in what had been the so-called great room, with its soaring two-story ceiling, a yawning hole admitted the gray purple twilight. The broken skylight frame that once occupied the hole in the ceiling had been tossed into a far corner. Previous sojourners had built fires on the concrete slab floor under the hole in the roof despite the obvious presence of a modernistic fireplace across the room. A ring of charred rocks on the floor surrounded the carbonized remnants of the last fire.

“Nice facilities,” Billy Bones said, setting down the two goat haunches. He went over to the hearth, stooped down low with his head inside it, and looked up the chimney.

“Why did they make a fire in the middle of the room?” Jasper asked.

“Trying to find out,” Billy said. He worked the flue damper back and forth. “Can’t see any daylight up in there,” he said.

“It’s pretty dark out.”

“You’d see something if the chimney wasn’t stopped up. I say, when in Rome, do like the goddamn Indians. We’ll make our fire on the floor.”

Nothing was left in the kitchen. Even the counters and cabinets had been ripped out. Animals had been visiting the master bedroom on the first floor. The slate-blue carpeting reeked of musky urine and dark shiny scats lay here and there.

“You can have this one,” Billy said.

“It smells horrible,” Jasper said.

“Just kidding.”

They ventured upstairs. Two bedrooms on the back side of the house had been wrecked when a dead maple tree crashed through the eaves in a lightning storm, admitting the weather in a ten-foot-long gash where the wall met the ceiling. All the windows were broken. Weeds were growing in the carpet near where the light and water leaked inside. Both rooms stank ferociously. In a third bedroom across the hall, a shattered skylight had let in enough water for the hardwood floor to have heaved up its warped parquets. The bathroom was stripped of all furnishings. In what had been an adjoining dressing room the wall was splashed with something resembling great gouts of blood.

“I bet someone was murdered here,” Billy said.

“Maybe the place is haunted.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Are you afraid of ghosts?”

“I suppose you’re not,” Billy said, reaching into his shoulder sack for the bottle of brandy. He took a slug and proffered it to Jasper. “Have a nip.”

“No thanks.”

“It’ll help you grow.”

“I don’t like liquor.”

“More for me, then.”

The last bedroom was dry and contained a carpet that didn’t stink.

“Looks like this is where we bunk up,” Billy said, tossing his sack into one corner. “That’ll be my area. No trespassing, hear? Meanwhile, my belly’s touching my backbone. Go get some firewood while you can still see out there and meet me back in that big room downstairs.”

“All right.”

When Jasper returned with a double armload of different-size branches suitable for a cook fire, Billy was carefully hanging strips of goat-leg meat over a curtain rod and skewering them on a couple of unwound wire coat hangers.

“You know how to make a fire, don’t you?” he said.

“’Course I do.”

Jasper had a miniature cabin of twigs alight on the floor in short order and carefully laid a succession of larger sticks on it until the fire was going strong. The smoke drafted up out of the hole in a straight column.

“Feels nice,” Billy said, taking another pull from the brandy jug. “Good job. Now, what all’d we get from those folks we stopped in on?”

Jasper rummaged in his pack, took out the jars of cornmeal, lima beans, honey, cider jelly, the hunk of cheese, the box of butternuts, and the two onions.

“What a haul!” Billy said. “Seems I remember you had a little cook pot in there.”

“I do.”

“Get her out and do like I say now. You know how to cut up a onion?”

“Of course I do.”

“Of course you do! Would you mind not taking that Mr.-know-it-all tone of voice with me? Can’t you tell I’m trying to be nice to you?”

“I don’t know—”

“You don’t know! Here I go making you my protégé, and collecting your doctor pay from those low-down, chiseling, land humpers, and what kind of thanks do I get? A lot of mouthy back talk? Now you and me are going to prepare a feast for ourself and bed down in a nice dry place, and I would like to be treated with a little more friendly respect, if you don’t mind.”

“You didn’t give me any of that money.”

“Well, I’m holding it for you, aren’t I?”

“How do I know you’re not just keeping it for yourself?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Billy reached into his pocket, took out a fistful of coins, and slapped them on the floor. He pushed the gold half eagle to one side along with eight silver quarters and a dozen dimes and shoved the rest toward Jasper: two silver quarters and five dimes. “This here’s yours.”

“I doctored the old man’s boils. How come you get to keep the gold?”

“Are you crazy? Didn’t we rob those folks?”

“You did. I was just there.”

“Like hell you were. You’re what’s called an accomplice. That’s a partner in crime of a lesser sort. Get it?”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with you robbing.”

“It’s too late for that,” Billy said. “And me being the chief robber —who, by the way, you wouldn’t get none of your doctoring pay without—then this gold piece and most of the silver is my takings and the rest is yours, and believe me I’m being generous with you.”

“It’s not right.”

“Lookit, I’m your teacher and you’re my protégé, goddamn it. How many times I got to explain the situation? Banditry is much more demanding and dangerous than doctoring. Accordingly, it ought to pay better. Nobody puts their life at risk tending boils.”

“I’d like to see you try it.”

“What in the hell’s eating you anyways?”

Jasper hesitated

“My dog got killed,” he said.

“Your dog? How so?”

“Stomped to death by a horse.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I went and killed the horse,” Jasper said.

Billy recoiled slightly and regarded Jasper with a curious glance in the flickering firelight.

“You killed a horse? All by yourself?”

“It isn’t that hard to do.”

“Who all’s horse was it?”

“A man in town. Nobody you’d know.”

Billy searched the firelight a moment and then looked Jasper in the eye.

“You really are a desperate little character, aren’t you?” he said.

“I’m a lost soul,” Jasper said.

“Not anymore you’re not. You’re Billy Bones’s compadre. You and me, we’re going a long way down the bold road of banditry and legend, and we’re going to start with a nice square supper. Now, do like I tell you.…”

TWENTY-SEVEN

It was a few minutes to midnight when Loren Holder heard a rapping on the door below his bedroom. He stumbled downstairs in the dark and worked his way through the parlor to the parish house door. He opened it to find Dr. Jerry Copeland on the portico hunched within an oilcloth raincoat. Water dripped from the wide brim of his straw hat and from the portico roof behind him.

“You up?” he asked.

“I am now. What time is it anyway?”

“It’s late. Can I talk to you?”

“Certainly. Come in.”

The doctor followed Loren into the kitchen. Loren shoved some splints into the firebox of the cookstove, where they flared in a residue of live embers, and put a teakettle on the steel surface above it.

“Have a seat,” he said. “Peppermint tea all right?”

“Thank you.”

“Did you find him?” Loren asked.

“No,” the doctor said. “Didn’t come across anyone who’d seen him. I don’t even know if we were searching in the right direction.”

Loren spooned mint leaves from a jar into a teapot and got two mugs out of the dish drainer. He could hear the doctor crying softly behind him. Eventually, steam whistled out of the kettle, then billowed. Loren brought the tea things over to the table and joined the doctor there, taking the seat at the end so as to sit closer to him. He dandled a spoon in the honey jar, waiting for the tea to steep. The doctor snuffled.

“This is breaking my heart,” he said.

“It must be hard,” Loren said. “I wonder sixteen times a day if my boy Evan will walk through the door again. It’s been almost two years. I wish I’d stopped him from going.”

The doctor gave an inconclusive grunt.

Loren poured the tea into two mugs. “Something’s come up while you were gone,” he said. “You know Tom Allison’s boy, Ned?”

“Of course I do.”

Loren laid out the story Ned had told Jane Anne about the two boys spying on Perry Talisker and Ned’s fears that the hermit might be behind Jasper Copeland’s disappearance.

The doctor listened with his mouth open, clutching the warm mug of tea close to his chest.

“I never saw him as a danger to anybody,” the doctor eventually said.

“I didn’t either,” Loren said. “And I’m not even sure what to make of it. But maybe it’s time you turned this thing over to some people who could help track down your boy.”

“If you mean Brother Jobe, I don’t like the son of a bitch.”

“You don’t have to like him.”

The doctor pressed the mug against his forehead and resumed crying quietly.

Loren reached over and squeezed the doctor’s left forearm. “I’m here with you,” he said, falling into his familiar role as pastor and counselor.

“I have to tell you what happened,” the doctor said. “It’s eating me up inside.” He proceeded to tell Loren about the night Jasper came home with his injured pup, how there was nothing he could do for the animal, nothing the vet, Jason LaBountie, could do, how Brother Jobe materialized out of the darkness, like a baleful spirit, how he, the doctor, begged Brother Jobe to work whatever powers he might possess to bring the dog back to life, how Brother Jobe said his powers only worked one way, meaning toward death, how the doctor both hated and feared him, and how he was ashamed of even thinking that the little tyrant possessed any kind of magical abilities, but he had seen things that made him very uneasy, and finally, behind everything, that the thought of his boy wandering somewhere through the countryside in the rain and darkness was killing him.