Usher's Passing (26 page)

Myra Tharpe and her son had just come in. The woman was carrying a large wicker basket, which she laid on the counter near the cash register. The waitress looked through a door into the kitchen and called for Mr. Berthon.

Raven rose from her seat. The Broadleaf Cafe's manager, a thick-set Foxton man with curly brown hair and a fleshy, bovine face, came out of the back to see the pies Mrs. Tharpe had brought.

"Well," Rix said, "I'll meet you to—" But then Raven had walked right past him, and he watched her approach the raggedy woman and boy. He noticed that Raven walked with a limp, and he wondered what had hurt her leg.

"Hello, Mrs. Tharpe," Raven said. Myra looked at her and blinked, a cold curtain of suspicion and dislike descending over her eyes. Raven regarded the handsome young boy at the woman's side. On his cheek and forehead were thin bandages, and Raven could smell—what was it?—the sharp odor of tobacco juice. "You must be Newlan. I'm Raven Dunstan."

"Yes, ma'am. I saw you this mornin', through my window."

"I came up to talk to you, but your mother wouldn't let me. I wanted to ask you some questions about—"

"Listen, you!" the other woman snapped. "You just leave us be, you hear?"

Berthon frowned. "Miz Tharpe, you're talkin' to the owner of the—"

"I
know
who I'm talkin' to, thank you!" Her eyes blazed at Raven, and she flicked a glance at Rix as he came up behind her. "My son don't want to be bothered. Is that spelled out clear enough for you? I'll take the usual price for my pies, please, Mr. Berthon."

Raven looked at the boy. He had the greenest eyes she'd ever seen, and right now they were troubled and confused. "You're old enough to speak for yourself," she said. "I'd like to know what happened to you and your brother the night before last."

"Go out to the truck, New!" Myra told him sharply. She extended her palm toward Berthon, who was counting a few bills and change from the register.

"New?" Raven's voice stopped the boy from leaving. "Look at that poster on the wall over there." She motioned with a tilt of her head.

New looked at it, and so did Rix. Near the kitchen door was a yellow poster showing the pictures of four children—three boys and a girl, all about nine or ten years old. Stenciled above the pictures were the words
REWARD FOR INFORMATION—HAVE YOU SEEN THESE CHILDREN? ALL REPLIES IN CONFIDENCE
.

At the bottom of the poster was written
CALL THE FOXTON DEMOCRAT
, followed by a phone number. Rix had no idea what the poster meant, but he studied each photograph with a growing sense of unease.

"Two of those children," Raven said, "have been missing for more than a year. The little girl vanished the first of this month. The other boy went out hunting with his father two weeks ago, and neither one of them came home. Sheriff Kemp has a stack of folders in his office, New. Each one of them represents a child, aged from six to fourteen, who disappeared into thin air—just as your brother did. I'm trying to find out how and why."

New stared at the poster. His eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn't speak.

Myra took her money and clasped her son's shoulder to guide him out of the Broadleaf—but he resisted her as if he'd suddenly grown roots through the floor. She flashed a cutting glance at Raven, then seemed to see the man behind her for the first time.
"You,"
she whispered in an acid tone. "You're an Usher, ain't you?"

Oh Christ! Rix thought. Berthon and everybody else in the place were listening.

"I
know
you're an Usher. You've got the Usher look about you. Are you with this woman, Mr. Usher?"

Rix knew there was no use in lying. "Yes, I am."

"City woman," Myra said mockingly, "what you're lookin' for is right under your nose. You ask anybody hereabouts what goes on at night at Usherland. You ask 'em about that Lodge, and what kind of thing lives inside there, all alone, in the dark. New! We're goin' now!"

In his mind, New could see Nathan's face up there with the others. He should let this woman know what he'd seen, he told himself. He was the man of the house now, and telling her would be the right thing to do. His mother's hand tightened on his arm.
"New,"
she said.

The raw tension in her voice broke the spell. He looked at Raven Dunstan and wanted to tell her, but then his mother pulled at him and he let himself be led out the door. Feeling utterly helpless and frustrated, Raven watched through the door's glass as Myra Tharpe slid behind the wheel of their pickup truck. The boy got into the passenger side, and then the truck backed away from the curb and rattled down the street toward Briartop Mountain.

"Damn it!" Raven swore softly.

"Don't mind her, Miz Dunstan," Berthon said. "Myra Tharpe's one of them folks who stay to themselves, up on the mountain. Her husband died around the first of the year. She don't know nothin'."

That's where you're wrong, Raven thought.

Rix pulled his attention away from the poster. "What was all that about?"

"Something I'm working on." She didn't elaborate, because she didn't want to discuss it with everyone in the cafe listening.

Rix was in a hurry to leave. He could feel the stares fixed to the back of his neck. As Raven paid her check, Rix glanced again at the children's faces.

Disappeared into thin air.
Raven had said.
Just as your brother did.

He abruptly turned away and went out to stand in the bright sunlight. He'd parked the red Thunderbird around the corner, where it wouldn't be seen from Foxton's main street.

"What was she talking about?" Rix asked Raven when she came out. "She mentioned the Lodge."

Raven looked off into the distance, where Briartop Mountain's peak was lost in filmy clouds. This mention of the Lodge from Myra Tharpe wasn't the first insinuation Raven had heard; she'd discounted the tales as mountain superstition—but now she wondered whether, as with all superstition, there might not be a grain of truth in it. "The people around here believe that someone—
something
—
is living inside Usher's Lodge. When was it closed up?"

"After my grandfather died, in 1945. All the rooms have been left as they were then, but nobody lives there."

"Are you
sure
about that? Could some vagrant be hiding in there? Maybe a poacher?"

"No. There's no electricity, no lights. The windows are bricked up, and no one could find his way around in the dark."

"Is the Lodge locked?"

He shook his head. "My family's never seen the need to lock it. We've never had trouble with poachers before."

"But you don't know for sure that the Lodge is uninhabited, do you?" Raven asked pointedly. "With all those rooms, someone could hide very easily."

Rix didn't answer. He realized she was right; there were hundreds of places in the Lodge where a vagrant could hide, and with a gun one could easily feed off the land.

"I have to get back to the office," Raven said, checking her watch. "I'll meet you here tomorrow."

Rix watched her limp away. In his mind he saw the pictures of those children on the poster, their faces smiling and unaware. The afternoon light was turning bloody. He hurried around the corner to his car.

As he drove away from Foxton, a storm of troubled thoughts whirled through his head.
Disappeared into thin air . . . Have You Seen These Children? . . . Sheriff Kemp has a stack of folders in his office . . . Disappeared into thin air, just as your brother did . . .

Pumpkin Man's in the woods, he thought suddenly. No, no; that was a story to scare children, a Halloween tale for a chilly October night.

The skeleton swung through Rix's mind in awful slow motion, its eyeholes dripping gore. In the next instant, Rix had to jerk the wheel to the right because he'd been drifting over the center line.

A mile from Foxton, Rix glanced in his rearview mirror and noticed a battered brown van on the road behind him. It followed him around the next curve, then abruptly turned off onto a dirt road before he crossed over into Usherland. Moonshiner, Rix thought; he could use a good slug of mountain brew about now.

When the red Thunderbird was out of sight, the brown van stopped, turned around, and headed toward Foxton again.

AS THE WIND WHOOPED AND WAILED OUTSIDE THE GATEHOUSE
, and tree branches clawed at the moon, Nora St. Clair Usher slowly gave up her secrets to Rix.

It was almost one o'clock, and Rix had been reading through her diary since before eleven, when he'd excused himself from the game room after Katt had whipped his tail in chess. She'd been thoughtful and precise in her moves, and had given no indication of what she and Walen had talked about that afternoon. Boone had come in and played darts by himself, trying to stir up some trouble by inquiring as to where Rix had gone riding, but Rix had successfully staved him off. After dinner, Boone had gone to the stables to check on the horses for the night. Rix had lodged a chair and a suitcase against his door to keep Puddin' from barging in.

Now Rix sat at his desk before the window, carefully turning the brittle pages. Nora's handwriting was clear, her prose direct and without flowery excess. Some of the pages were too faded to be legible, but the story of her life at Usherland was coming together in Rix's mind like a delicate watercolor. He could see the Lodge as she described it: the rooms, corridors, and chambers spotless, filled with priceless antiques from around the world, the hardwood floors waxed and shining, the myriad windows in all shapes and sizes framing only Usher earth. By January 1920, she was resigned to the constant presence of workmen—who started promptly at dawn and worked until dusk. The Lodge spread to even larger proportions.

On lazy spring afternoons she enjoyed boating across the lake, usually in the company of Norris Bodane, and watching the wild swans that nested on the northern shore. It was during one of those outings, in April 1920, when Erik was in Washington on business, that she noted a peculiarity about the Lodge. The workmen had cut away a stand of pines from the northern face of the house in order to erect their scaffolds, and there in the Lodge's stones, from roof to foundation, was a jagged crack, filled with mortar, at least two feet wide.

When she inquired, Norris had explained in his distinctive North Carolinian accent that the weight of the Lodge was making it slowly sink into the island. The crack had been there for years, and Erik was making sure it didn't widen by having the workmen balance the Lodge with new additions. Not to worry, he said; the Lodge would be standing for little Walen's great-great-grandchildren.

Nora had her own suite of rooms in the east wing, from which she rarely ventured. She'd been lost several times in the Lodge, and had wandered hopelessly through the maze of rooms until she'd been lucky enough to find a servant. Sometimes days passed without her even seeing Erik, and Ludlow was no more than a ghost heard long after midnight as he walked the corridors.

Rix was fascinated by her. He was watching a little girl become a woman. Her voice was breathless when she described banquets for three hundred people; seething when she berated Erik for flying the captured German Fokker—shipped over from England after the Great War—past the nursery windows and upsetting the baby; loving and tender when she wrote about little Walen.

Little Walen, Rix thought grimly. Oh, Nora, if you could only see him now!

Wind thrashed the trees outside. He was nearing the end of her diary. He was Nora's confidant, her final companion, and as he read, time shifted, cracked open, drew him into its whirlpool of people and events.

Nora stood on her balcony in her long white dress and watched the surly May sky. Rainclouds were rolling across the mountains like freight trains, each carrying a heavier load than the one before. Threads of dark purple veined the sky, and in the distance danced quick flashes of lightning. When raindrops began to ripple the lake's surface, Nora went into her bedroom and closed the balcony doors. Thunder boomed, shaking the windows in their frames.