Thistle and Twigg (10 page)

M
y pen hesitated over the notepad. A construction company? A chill went up my spine, for I remembered driving by a construction site on the outskirts of town. As I went by, I heard a loud blast. My face must have reflected my thoughts, for Phoebe said, “What’s wrong?”

“You must promise me to be extra careful, my dear. Construction sites often have explosives.”

“Oh, I won’t go near anyplace where they’re blasting… Oh.” She covered her mouth with her hand as the implication sank in.

“The explosives they use aren’t in the same category as a Molo-tov cocktail. Still, a little caution is in order.”

“I know where she lives. I’ll find out if she did it or not. I have my ways.”

We sat and talked about other things. I saw no point in keeping Phoebe in the dark any longer in regard to buying Cal’s land. She promised not to tell anyone. I didn’t tell her all his conditions, only that we agreed he would remain there until he died. “After I go by the bank tomorrow, I suppose I could go by Shelley’s office to see if the land-sale document has been drawn up. I doubt she will have had time but I can check. She may do it quickly since Cal was so anxious about it.”

While I spoke, I looked beyond Phoebe into the center of the kitchen and became aware of a small reflection of light about the size of a dime a few feet beyond her shoulder. The light disappeared almost as soon as I noticed it. It left me with the impression of candlelight shining on copper. This was only a fleeting impression, for not only had it disappeared by the time I fully registered it, but my attention was drawn away by noises outside.

Phoebe said, “What was that? Did you hear something?”

Homer woofed once, quietly, from the backyard.

We both rose and peered out the window over my sink. The moon was full. Even at midnight, we could see a good distance, across the wide side yard all the way to the locked gate at the refuge entrance, thanks to the high security light above it. We saw nothing else there in the light or farther along the refuge boundary and the narrow road that ran between it and my land. But as we looked to the back corner of my yard into the darkness, moving lights bounced near the access road that edged my property and ran through the woods.

“What in the world,” Phoebe said. “There’s somebody fooling around in the graveyard out there.”

At first, I wondered how she knew about the cemetery since this was her first visit. I wasn’t thinking. Of course Phoebe would know every inch of the county very well.

Before I could comment, Phoebe was through the kitchen, the back porch and its screen, and fast walking across the yard, tightening her robe belt around her waist as she strode. I grabbed a flashlight out of a kitchen drawer and stepped into my gardening shoes beside the outer screen door.

“Come along, Homer,” I whispered. “Not a sound.” I put my finger over my lips then dropped it, realizing how foolish it was to think a dog would understand my words or sign language. Foolish or not, he obeyed. He was a hunter, after all, and would be accustomed to stealth and perhaps similar signals from Cal.

Phoebe was well ahead of me so I hurried to try and catch up. The graveyard she referred to was that of the Hardwick family, where the remains of five generations lay. I hadn’t as yet found time to study the tombstones or the family history, but it was high on my list of priorities once I’d settled in. The moon illuminated the open yard. I turned off my flashlight. I didn’t need it to see the figures moving ahead.

Three lights bobbed in the darkness. We could hear hushed voices coming from near the lights. I could make out five or six forms moving about in the moonlight. I had a moment of regret for charging ahead rather than phoning the police.

Phoebe called out to them as she neared the cemetery boundaries. “Hey! What are y’all a’doing out here?” The three flashlight beams jerked in our direction and shone on us as we approached. Those holding the flashlights stood still; two others fled and hid behind trees beyond the farthest tombstone.

“Stay with me, Homer,” I said. I ran a hand over his head. “Stay right here.” He sat first then slowly lowered himself onto his belly. I clicked on my flashlight again to better see my visitors’ faces, one male and two female, who immediately put their hands in the air.

“We’re sorry,” a young woman, about twenty years old with braided pigtails, said. Various tools and other objects I couldn’t readily identify stuck out the many pockets of her denim overalls. “We didn’t mean to disturb anyone.”

The blond girl next to her, heavier and taller than her friend, nodded agreement. Her white T-shirt stretched across a wide middle and rode up due to the weight of a leather carpenter’s belt slung low on her hips. The belt was also full of various accoutrements that made her jeans sag at the waist, revealing a few inches of skin.

Phoebe put her hands on her hips and addressed the young man. “Riley Gardner, is that you behind that wild getup?”

The getup was something I recognized—an out-of-date set of infrared night visors once used by the military looking like a rectangular box strapped tightly around his head and eyes. He wore an olive drab T-shirt with the word “Army” across the chest and a pair of camouflage pants, a type the Colonel had been fond of. The pants legs were tucked into shin-high military-issue boots. I immediately thought of the memo on Detective Waters’ desk regarding the man with the scar, the one I’d seen, presumably, in the grocery store’s parking lot a few days earlier.

He lowered his chin down and into his neck while raising the visor to rest on top of his head. Large dark eyes cast a pleading look to us each in turn. No, this was not the same man I’d seen. Riley had long hair. He was taller, thinner, and had a slight stoop in his shoulders. I remembered now that the other man was clean shaven. Riley had a long, drooping moustache.

“Ah apologize,” he said in a deep voice. I didn’t understand him at first. He dragged out each syllable to double, perhaps triple its normal length, the flow of them thick and glottal like a Slavic dialect. This gave me pause at first as I considered, then rejected, the languages of several Balkan countries before realizing, of course, that this was a variation of the native tongue.

Phoebe huffed and inclined her head. “You better do more than apologize, and be quick about it. Explain yourselves. And, for goodness sake, put your hands down. We aren’t carrying and you’re not under arrest. Yet.”

“We were on the refuge trails,” the stocky blond girl said, “We come out here sometimes to… well, when it’s a full moon.” She and her companions looked up, as if the fact that the moon was full and visible somehow lent credence to her story.

“Aren’t you Shelby Taylor’s granddaughter?” Phoebe asked her.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m Sarah,” the girl said.

“Wouldn’t she have a fit if she knew you were traipsing around in the middle of the night on private property and scaring poor sweet little Jane. Those refuge trails close every night at sundown and you all aren’t supposed to be over there either.”

The two girls looked to each other for support, shuffled about a bit, then the blonde said, “Please don’t tell Granny.”

She looked too old to worry what her grandmother might think but, as I was quickly learning in my short time in Tullulah, things were different here.

The girl in pigtails said, “It’s kind of a secret.”

A hissing sound beside me of Phoebe slowly inhaling through clamped teeth facilitated a more prompt and complete confession.

“We’ve started us a group,” Sarah explained in a hurry. “A little club. Completely harmless. There’s lots of other groups like it around the country, so it’s perfectly respectable. It’s just that it’s a little … unusual. We’ve never told anybody around here about it.”

I couldn’t wait to hear what someone in this delightfully strange community would consider “unusual.” We waited as Mrs. Taylor’s granddaughter gathered her courage.

Could it be they were Druids or New Age Witches? Many worship nature on nights of the full moon. Their clothes looked wrong, however, and I couldn’t imagine what use night visors and their other various tools might be to those who practice the old religions. “Are you Wiccans, dear?” I asked.

Sarah fervently shook her head. “Oh, no, ma’am!” The three of them looked to one another in horror. “We’re not a bit wicked. We are good, completely good, I promise.”

Like many other things in the outside world, the word “Wicca” apparently had yet to reach the fair boundaries of Tulluluh.

Phoebe folded her arms across her chest and cocked her head to the other side. “And what kind of a club are we talking about here?”

The three of them began babbling together until Phoebe said, “Sarah! What in tarnation is it?”

Sarah hung her head. “We’re ghost hunters. We got some readings, and then got excited and followed them and ended up over here. When we didn’t meant to.”

Phoebe and I looked at each other, both perplexed. Riley raised his hand, as if Phoebe were a teacher who must call on him before he could speak.

“What, Riley?” she said in an exasperated tone.

“Ah can explain,” he drawled, coming almost to a stop between each stretched syllable. Fascinating. I determined to begin a notebook on local accents as a reference tool, much as I had done when working on digs in India, Southeast Asia, and remote areas of Eastern Europe.

“See,” Riley continued, “Went in yonder.” He pointed to the refuge land on the other side of the road. “Callie,” whom he indicated by sweeping his arm and pointing to the girl in pigtails, “got strong, strawwwwng vaahhhhbes. Then me and Sarah,” here he indicated the blond girl, “did the same.”

As the girls’ heads bobbed in unison, I caught a glimpse of the other figures I’d seen run away. They peered out from behind tree trunks in the near distance. In the dark beginnings of the wood, I could barely make them out, but as they moved slowly forward into the moonlit cemetery, their shapes became clear.

One was a tall young man who looked about the same age and height as Riley. The other couldn’t have been more than a teenager, perhaps only a boy of ten or twelve years old.

These two were different. The most obvious thing was that they carried no hardware, presumably ghost-hunting equipment, as Riley and the two girls did. Secondly, they did not have fear in their faces, nor discomfort at being found out. They both looked at me, with not even a glance at Phoebe or the others, smiling as if they might laugh at any moment. An inexplicable feeling of calm came over me, or more precisely a wave of loveliness, of something innocent and untouched, embodied and standing there beside Riley and the two girls. Strange, I know, but there it is.

“So,” Phoebe said, “there’s just the three of you? Nobody else running out here like a wild Indian?”

I was about to tell them that I had no objection to them “hunting” to their hearts’ delight, tonight or at any other time, when Phoebe’s comment made me realize another thing different about the very young boy’s attire. He was in a skin of fur wrapped about his lower torso and a necklace made of what looked like shells or bones.

As I processed this, the other part of Phoebe’s comment suddenly dawned on me. “Three, did you say?” I asked.

Riley nodded. “That’s rahhhght. Us three. Hope to get more. Y’all like to join us?”

The boy in the fur skin and his older companion, also in a costume of sorts, I then realized, grinned widely. The tall, older one had Anglo features. His clothes looked ordinary at first, but on closer inspection, the collar on his plain white shirt was something not worn since the late 1800s. His feet were bare. Suspenders held up plain trousers. Both shirt and pants looked handmade.

He raised a finger as if to say, “Watch this,” then he turned his head so that it was even with Riley’s. He blew in Riley’s hair, continuing down his ear and bare neck.

Riley shivered. His eyes bulged as he ran his hand over his head and neck. “Did y’all feel that?” he said.

“Feel what?” Phoebe said.

Riley jerked the infrared glasses down over his eyes and began scanning the area in a one hundred eighty degree sweep, high and low, and straight through the young man who stood beside him.

It was only then that I understood. How stupid of me not to see it earlier. The newcomers were not dressed in costume at all. The tall boy bowed to me first, then the young one followed suit. I must say I felt positively impolite to not respond at once but what could I do? Phoebe and the three ghost hunters obviously couldn’t see them. Only me.

While Riley continued sweeping the area with his infrared visors, his two friends took tools from their pockets. Sarah held what looked like a voltmeter that might be used to test electrical outlets. Callie, the girl with braids, took two short metal rods out of her pockets, one in each hand like a gunslinger drawing revolvers, and dropped to a half crouch. She held the rods before her with the long ends sticking forward and the short bent ends serving as handles.

Once I had a few moments to become accustomed to the idea of the two boys as otherworldly, I noticed a vague halo shimmering about them, as if the moonlight reflected differently off their bodies. I suppose you’d say “bodies.” They looked solid enough to me, enough to fool me at first sight. Watching them run away through the tombstones, a difference in movement became apparent. They seemed to float. Their feet appeared to touch ground but at the same time they bounced a bit as if gravity didn’t hold them down.

Riley took long, slow strides forward, around and around, edging toward the middle of the cemetery. He pulled a camera out of a pocket, turned, and held it toward me. “You don’t mind if we take pictures, do you, ma’am?”

“Not at all,” I said, wondering what he thought he would take pictures of when he obviously could see nothing. “Is your camera special, then? In capturing ghost images?”

“Not special. We get some mighty strange things sometimes though.” He patted the top of the camera. “Get something good, be sure to show you.”