“Funny? Why?”
Duke stared at him for a long moment. “You…you don’t know, do you? Well, why would you? I came back from ’Nam in seventy-one with a shot-up hip and a Purple Heart. Then what I’d done kept eatin’ at me, so… I went to the sheriff and told him. I served my time—one year on a two-year sentence. I’ve just been out since October. But I want you to know, Billy, that it was never my idea. I wasn’t the one who came up with the idea…”
“What idea?”
“The fireworks,” Duke said quietly. “I thought you knew; I thought everybody knew. I was one of the boys who put all those fireworks in the bonfire. It was…supposed to be a joke. Just a joke. I thought it’d make pretty colors. I thought people would laugh. I swear, I never knew it would blow up like that. My dad found out about it, and he shipped me off to the Marines damned fast. I can’t ever forget that night, Billy. I don’t sleep too good. I can still, y’know, hear the sounds they made. Billy, you’d…you’d know if any of them were still there, wouldn’t you? I mean, you could tell, and you could help them?”
“They’re gone,” he replied. “I’m sure of it.”
But Duke shook his head. “Oh, no they’re not. Oh, no.” He opened his eyes and tapped a finger against his skull. “They’re all still in here, every one of them who died that night. You can’t help me, can you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. I served my time, got out on good behavior. My dad pretended I was away, workin’ in Georgia. Well…” He moved past Bonnie and took his hat off the rack on the wall. It was a gas-station cap. “I’d best get back to work. The gas won’t pump itself. I thought you knew about all that, Billy. I surely did.”
“They’re gone,” Billy said as he reached the door. “You don’t have to keep them inside you anymore.”
“Yes I do,” Duke said, and then he opened the door—the little bell over it tinkled merrily—and he was gone.
“We were wrong about your mother,” Peel said. “All of us were wrong. It wasn’t evil. It never was, was it?”
Billy shook his head; his eyes were watering, and Bonnie pressed close to his side to support him.
“Terrible thing about that Falconer boy. Heard he died in a plane crash in Mexico, of all places. God only knows what he was doin’ down there. I heard he went off the deep end, just gave up everything…”
“Not everything,” Billy said. “Just the things that didn’t matter.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” He looked again at the needlepoint owl. It was a beautiful picture, and would be seen by a lot of people. He couldn’t think of a better place for it to be hanging.
Peel touched his shoulder. “Bill, I’ve got a fine idea! Why don’t you and the little lady join my family and me for dinner tonight? I’ll call her, and I guarantee you the finest fried-chicken dinner you ever put in your mouth! All right?”
“You got room at that table for me?” Hiram asked.
“Maybe we do. What the hell…sure. We got room for everybody! Okay, Bill? How about it?”
He smiled, glanced at Bonnie, and then nodded. “We’d like that very much.”
“Fine! Let me get on the horn right now!”
“Curtis,” Billy said as he moved to the phone, “I’m going to see my mother. She is in the cemetery isn’t she?”
“Oh. Yes, she is. Don’t you worry about a thing. We took care of her real good, Bill. You’ll see.”
“We’ll be back.” They walked to the door, and as Billy opened it he heard Peel say over the phone, “Ma? You’re gonna have a real celebrity over tonight! Guess who’s…”
“Sheer guts,” Hiram grunted.
Fifteen minutes later, Billy was standing with Bonnie beside his mother’s grave. His father was buried a few feet away. Pine needles covered the ground, and the chill wind whispered softly through the trees. Billy could smell pine sap: the aroma of life, waiting to burst free in April.
A stone marker had been planted at the head of Ramona’s grave. It was fine cut, simple but proud. It gave her name, her date of birth and death, and underneath that, in expertly etched block letters: DAUGHTER OF HAWTHORNE.
Billy put his arm around Bonnie. His mother wasn’t here, he knew; her body was, returning now to the earth as all bodies must, but her soul—that part of her that had made her very special—was somewhere else, still carrying on her Mystery Walk. And his would go on too, from this place and moment. He would meet the shape changer again, because it was part of the Evil that lived in the world, but he knew now that, though it couldn’t be totally destroyed, it could be bested. The eagle could win over the snake. Courage could win over fear.
A few tough stalks of goldenrod grew in the brush a few feet from Ramona’s grave. Billy picked some, scattering the yellow wild flowers over the earth. “Flowers for the dead,” he said, “and for the living.” He gave Bonnie the remaining stalk, and saw her strange and beautiful eyes shine.
They stood together, as the clouds moved overhead in a slow and graceful panorama of white and gray. Snow flurries began to spin before the wind, clinging to their hair and eyelashes, and Billy remembered the infant step of his Mystery Walk—when he and his father had left the cabin to walk in the snow and had passed the Booker house. Now he had someone else to walk beside—someone who could understand him and believe in him, as much as he in her.
“I knew you’d come back,” Bonnie said. “I knew it. You left the piece of coal, and I didn’t think you’d leave without it. I kept it by my bed all the time, until one morning when I woke up and it wasn’t there. I had a dream that night…”
“About what?”
“You,” she replied. “And me, too. We were…together, and we were old. We were tired, but it was a good tired, like you’ve done a hard day’s work and you know you’ll have a peaceful sleep. I don’t know where we were, but we were sitting in the sun and we could see the ocean. We were holding hands.” She shrugged, a blush creeping across her freckled cheeks. “I don’t know, but…after that dream, I knew you’d be all right. I knew you’d come back. Funny, huh?”
“Why?”
“It’s the first dream I ever had that I wasn’t afraid of,” Bonnie said.
It was time to go. They walked down the hill to the car and got in. His Mystery Walk was about to carry him—and possibly Bonnie as well—far away from Hawthorne, he realized. Life and Death were part of the same puzzle, part of the same strange and miraculous process of growth. He hoped someday to work in the parapsychology labs himself, to go to school, to study as much as he could; he wanted to help others understand that Death wasn’t an ending, and that Life itself was a wonderful mystery full of chances and challenges.
“Have you ever wanted to see England?” he asked her.
“Why?”
He smiled faintly. “Dr. Hillburn told me there are supposed to be more haunted houses in England than in any country on earth.”
They drove away from the cemetery. Billy looked back over his shoulder, through the snow’s thin white curtain, until the marble marker was out of sight. So much to be done! he thought. So much to be learned!
Billy turned his attention to the road that stretched out ahead, out of Hawthorne and into the world. And he would carry with him his mother’s words of courage:
No fear.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
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copyright © 1983 by Robert R. McCammon
cover design by Thomas Ng
978-1-4532-3214-9
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Robert R. McCammon, Mystery Walk
(Series: # )
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