He shifted uncomfortably before saying, “It’s not like I expected to find a real psychic. It was a last-ditch effort based on an experiment Charlie planned but hadn’t gotten around to yet. I had all the faith in the world in my brother, but I admit”—he gave a wistful smile that sat oddly on his roughly carved face—“I thought it was his scientific Santa Claus.”
“Santa Claus?”
“Every scientist has one. The theory you want to believe but you know either isn’t real or is beyond your ability to prove.” He shrugged. “It was Charlie’s one fault: he was never wrong. Never. There were times I was jealous. I’d feel guilty for saying it, but hell, Charlie would laugh.”
“Good. You can save that guilt for me, then.” There was one beer left on the desk. I went for it without offering it to Hector first. Faint of heart ne’er won fair beer.
He returned to the subject of my future survival. “I’ve assured everyone that there will be no readings on anyone, that I take violations of project members’ privacy very seriously. Most don’t believe you’re psychic anyway, and whoever killed Charlie doesn’t know I suspect murder. You’re as safe as I can make you.”
“Which would be not very.” I opened the beer and took two deep draughts. “You don’t know murderers.”
“And you do?”
“I’ve been in the business, really in the business, for twelve years. I know murderers. I know the ones who know what they are. And I know the ones who think leaving senile Grandpa Eddie under a tree in the woods in two feet of snow wearing nothing but his underwear is just a mercy. ‘Oh, Officer, he wanders off all the time. I’m so scared for him. I’ve been praying and praying.’ Whether it’s for fun or for convenience, killing to both kinds is like a good beer. One is never enough.” I shook my half-empty bottle to demonstrate. “And when one of them has a lot to lose, paranoia is like air to them.”
He took the hint of my wagging bottle and reached behind him for the bag to pull two more out. Now that was magic. Screw being a psychic. He handed me the second-to-last one, and took the last for himself. “Why would a murderer come to you to begin with?”
“They’re stupid, or they’re nonbelievers there with their boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands. Mostly they’re stupid.”
“Unfortunately, whoever killed Charlie isn’t stupid. Chances are, he’s one of the most intelligent men in the country. Which is why this.” Hector had come into the room wearing a lightweight black jacket. He stood, stripped it off, and tossed it onto the desk. Then he pulled out the gun he’d had tucked into his waistband at the small of his back. He held it out to me, butt first. “Wear the jacket. Keep it hidden. If someone makes a move …” He gave a grim flash of teeth. “Just make sure you put a hole in the right person.”
I made no move to take the gun, an automatic—ironically, the twin to the fake one I kept under my desk. “I don’t like guns.”
“You probably wouldn’t like a geek, as you label us, putting you down like a rabid dog. Only in a far more inventive and painful way. Take it.”
“Let me rephrase. I won’t use a gun.” Not again. No matter how deserving of a bullet someone might be.
He frowned. “This could be your life. I’ll do everything I can, but someone got to Charlie. They might be able to get to you. I’m going to get the bastard, don’t doubt that. Get him and make him pay, but until then, don’t you want to live?”
“What I want is to stay sane.” I cut my finger on a letter opener once, badly enough to gush blood and require a few stitches. When I smelled the blood, tasted it when I automatically put my finger into my mouth to suck it clean, I saw it all again. I lived it again. Screaming. Blood. Brains. Gobbets of fat spilling on the floor. A genuine posttraumatic flashback—so the used college psych textbook from my shelf said. If a little blood did that, what would shooting a man do?
Nothing good.
“Give me a stun gun or a Taser. Or I’ll keep this.” I hoisted the bottle in my hand and finished it off. “I’m good at improvising. But no guns. I guess an ex-soldier like you can’t understand that.”
“There’s no such thing as an ex-soldier, and no one who understands it better.” He returned the gun and shrugged back into the jacket, hiding it from sight. “I’d put someone outside your door, but I don’t know who I can trust now that I know you’re the real thing. I can’t be sure if they’re my men or someone else’s.”
“I hope Thackery is on your list.”
“Just because he’s a sociopath and an asshole? Or does a good imitation of both?” He moved to the door.
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor. I know. People tell me that all the time.”
“Working with you makes it self-defense,” he said. “So, tomorrow at eight?”
Bemused, I leaned back on the bed, resting on my elbows. Good old Hector had asked this time. He hadn’t told me; he’d asked. Charlie would’ve been proud. That wasn’t my usual sarcasm, either. He honestly would’ve been. He’d raised Hector up right. The man had manners when he wasn’t too full of darkness over his brother to remember them, which put him one up on me. I’d never learned to have them at all.
Manners or not, eight was eight. “Nine,” I countered. I thought about adding that Meleah could bring me breakfast again, but Hector’s manners might end there. Charlie and Meleah had ended their relationship before he died, but I doubt that mattered to his brother. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, either, but it would have if I let it. I didn’t. It was another thing that floated through my Charlie memories, fading but still there. He wanted Meleah for Hector. He’d figured out that Meleah realized she had chosen the wrong brother, and Charlie being Charlie, he’d planned on making that right.
But then he died, and nothing can be made right by a dead man.
“Eight it is,” Hector said, ignoring my counter-offer. Ex-military trumped manners every time.
• • •
It was eight in the morning when we left, but this time it wasn’t just Hector and me. That son of a bitch Thackery came along for the ride. Not in the same car, of course. He didn’t want to be contaminated by something science couldn’t measure. Or he was the murderer and playing it safe. He had Dr. Fujiwara with him. Fujiwara, whose eyes were sadder than previously. After my seizure, I’d gone from a sympathetic little lab mouse to a damaged one. He looked down the one time I met his gaze, but not before I saw the lines of pained regret creasing his forehead.
In contrast, Thackery’s expression was one of unconcealed disdain. His desire to have space between him and me went beyond the possibility of being a murderer. He was actually repulsed by me personally. It wasn’t hard to see in his stony regard and the tight line of his lips. Contamination, a freak, right in his clean hall of science. Maybe you could back my freakdom up with theories, and as science progressed, maybe evidence and proof that could be measured by a machine would rain down from the sky, but I was still a person, not a process. An unpredictable person, and Dr. Thackery didn’t like unpredictable, I was sure. It didn’t fit into his narrow, tight world—his results-driven, money-driven world. If only I’d been a process, if only I’d fit into a computer program or a test tube, I was sure I’d have been all puppies and sunshine to him.
It was fine by me having him follow in a car behind us. That early in the morning, I didn’t want to see anything, and definitely not Thackery’s rigidly disapproving face. Hector had the sense not to talk to me until I’d put away two coffees. Cafeteria coffee, utter crap, but with enough caffeine to have my fingers tingling under the gloves and a few words spilling from my lips in a cranky mutter. “Where?”
Well, one word. I was a man who got to the point. It was one of my better qualities.
“A take on Lizzie Borden. A son beat his parents to death with a chunk of firewood in 1853. And to commemorate the occasion, they turned the place into a bed-and-breakfast. Have a few cold chills with your honeymoon. The proprietor says it’s a popular spot.”
“Ain’t t
hat grand? Nice to know my faith in humanity is right where it should be—the basement.” Outside, it was drizzling. Sun hot enough to sear and a sticky rain the next day. That was Georgia for you. “Seems high-profile enough to have had the newspapers cover it. You shouldn’t need me. Reliving murders isn’t like cable, okay? It doesn’t make for a good morning. In fact, it makes for a pretty shitty one.”
“Have my coffee. I don’t think yours has kicked in yet.” Hector turned on the wipers. “The mother and father disappeared. When he was sober, Seth Miles stated that his parents ran off and left him with a worthless farm and a stack of unpaid bills. When he was drunk, he said he killed them. Their bodies were never found, and nothing was ever proven. Suspected, yes. But a drunken confession and no bodies didn’t make it to court back then. It is possible his parents left Miles. He was an alcoholic troublemaker most of his life and a drain on their resources.”
“And if wishes were horses, it wouldn’t be rain falling from the sky right now. It’d be a storm of horseshit.” I took his coffee and gave a tired, mulish stare out the windshield. Being used as a Geiger counter for terror and death managed to erase a fraction of the beer-buzz camaraderie of the night before.
“I’m sorry, Jackson.” He did sound sorry, but that helped me exactly zero. “But you’re the only one who can do this. Of all your colleagues, you were the only genuine article. You’re rare.” I thought I sensed a fleeting regret. “Which isn’t so great for you, I know, but the sooner this is over, the sooner you can get on with your life, you and your sister.”
Hector didn’t mention getting on with his life. It would be hard to think about if I were in his shoes. He’d spent so much time running around trying to free Charlie that he probably hadn’t had time to genuinely come to grips with his brother’s death. Near death. Whatever the hell it was. He had that ahead of him; he wasn’t a fool, he knew that. It wasn’t precisely something to look forward to.
Been there, repressed that.
The Miles farm was long gone. The neighborhoods that now covered it were older. Early nineteen hundreds, houses with character and so much gingerbread trim that I expected to see Hansel and Gretel any minute—I hoped not pursued by a man with a hunk of firewood and a crazed, wild light in his eye.
Although the farm was gone, the main house remained. With a quaintly old-fashioned sign surrounded by masses of daisies, the Miles Massacre House was still open to all. It was actually called the Peach Tree Inn, but where was the truth in advertising in that? We pulled into the circular drive of the rambling farmhouse, followed closely by the car carrying Thackery, Fujiwara, and the military driver requisitioned from the motor pool. The military might have Thackery by the short hairs, but I didn’t think the asshole knew it. Or if he did know it, he thought he could twist it to his advantage. The man had ego, you had to give him that.
“You think Thack and his pet, Fujiwara, booked the honeymoon suite here?” I drawled.
As expected, I was ignored. I climbed out of the car and squashed a daisy. Frowning, I stepped back and watched as the flower slowly wavered back upright. Tess had liked daisies. Didn’t all little girls? I carefully circumvented the billowing drifts of white and yellow and headed for the porch stairs. Another wraparound porch typical of the South, it was sprinkled with wicker furniture, mainly rockers, and pot after pot of blooming flowers. Poppies, roses, brown-eyed Susans, and more daisies.
It was remarkably cheerful for a supposed house of death. Didn’t mean a thing. I’d once touched the wedding ring of a perpetually smiling grandma. She had smothered two of her babies fifty-some years before, and she’d never felt one moment of regret. The sweet hid the poisonous all the time—in nature and in people. Why should buildings be any different?
“You said you don’t actually have to go into the buildings?” Thackery’s voice came from behind. “That’s what Allgood’s report stated. You can do your little tricks from right here, then.”
The man knew I was the genuine article—he had proof—but it didn’t stop the thick coating of disdain over his words. If he was capable of emotions other than arrogance and contempt, I’d yet to see that. It put my cocky sarcasm in the shade. I might have to try a little harder.
I bared my teeth in a humorless grin. “Care to shake? I’ll bet you have all sorts of skeletons rattling around. Got a little too friendly with the family goat when you were a kid? Let’s have a look.”
Most likely a murderer, and I was pushing him. Sometimes I just couldn’t help myself.
Cold eyes took me in and dismissed me. “Do your job, Eye.”
Yeah, do my job. Thanks to my third-strike baby sister, that’s what I was getting paid for.
“I’m Miz Susannah. This is my place. Can I help you gentlemen? You boys need some rooms?”
A curious voice came from behind the screen door. There was also a mop of tightly curled silver hair, amber-brown eyes magnified by thick glasses, skin as dark as aged mahogany, and a smile as cheerful as an entire field of those front-yard daisies.
“Ma’am.” Hector moved in to distract her while I stripped off my glove and put a casual hand against the wood of the house. It was painted a brilliant blue, the pure color of a summer sky. It was the color of a kid’s playhouse, not what you would put on a real house, but it worked. It was nice. It made me think of a childhood I’d never had—candy apples and fresh white sheets drying in a spring breeze, barking dogs and sleeping cats, lemonade and new clothes for school. The American dream. I hadn’t had it, but it was right there. Year after year, happy people came and went, and the house was always that candy apple, sweet on sweet with every bite.
Until I took a bite of 1853.
It hadn’t been a chunk of firewood. It had been an axe handle. But it had done the job. First, dear old Dad. Dear old tightfisted Dad who never gave a nickel when a penny would do. And Mother, who whined and whined until you thought you’d go deaf from her pathetic bleats. She was the one who’d gone deaf, though—deaf, dumb, and blind, and no whining bitch deserved it more. The satisfaction that had come from beating her gray head over and over and over—
With the taste of a savage contentment not my own still in my mouth, I pulled my hand back and put my glove back on with quick, methodical movements. “Bingo. Can we go now?”
Fujiwara’s soft, faintly accented voice asked politely, “You actually did see it? You know it was murder even though no bodies were recovered?”
“I saw it. And you people didn’t include what kind of farm it was in the file. It was a pig farm. He fed Mom and Pop to the pigs. Twenty minutes later, they were being digested. The perfect crime.” I amended, “For a drunken idiot.”
Miz Susannah remained behind her screen door, her mouth a perfect O, showing a good dental plan and sturdy dental adhesive. Then she croaked like an unsettled crow, “You … you boys want some lemonade … and cookies?” She started to close the main door. “For the road?”
Fujiwara brightened. “I would very much like some lemonade.”
Thackery gave him a withering glare, then turned to clatter down the porch stairs and back to the second car.
“No lemonade for you, Fuji,” I said sympathetically, because I wouldn’t have minded some lemonade and cookies, either. But when I turned back to see what my chances were, Miz Susannah seemed to have had enough of our weirdness and slammed the thick wooden door behind the screen. I heard a bolt slide into place.
Making friends wherever we went.
13
Two days, ten misses, and one hit later, I was standing at Job’s Quarry, my hand wrapped around Charlie’s keys.
It was Job as in the biblical Job. The preacher had been Brother Job, and the town was the Trials as in the trials of Job. 1840. It hadn’t been much of a town or much of a cult. Ten gullible families and a scattering of tents that would do them until cabins could be built. But purification came first. You had to prove yourself righteous enough to receive God’s word through Brother Job and to live in the Trials
under the same prosperity the original Job had come to know once God and Satan had stopped dicking around with his life, killing his family, and giving him boils and leprosy to see just how far faith would go.
Show me a horror movie that equals that, and I’ll pay you fifty bucks.
Ten families plus Brother Job’s disciples came to about eighty people raising the canvas town of the Trials. At the end, there was only one to abandon it.
Job left the bloated, floating bodies of the faithful—and they were faithful, suicidally faithful—and wandered through the woods, shouting to heaven of his trust in the Almighty. He stayed faithful, too, despite the loss of all of his followers, despite the hunger, the coming winter chill. The walking, raving embodiment of faith … right up to when he ended up as a bear’s last snack before hibernation. When those jaws fastened around his neck, ripping and crushing, that faith vanished like a magician’s rabbit.
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.
Then again, who’s to say the hungry bear didn’t get its prayer answered?
I stopped staring at the blazing orange water and turned my head to see Fujiwara eating a sausage-and-biscuit sandwich he must’ve brought from the cafeteria. “They put blood in their biscuits.”
He gaped at me. “Ex-excuse me?”
“Job’s followers. As the wine was the blood of Jesus, Job followed in his footsteps and sliced his arm every morning when the women made biscuits. Drip drip.” I smiled cheerfully. “Smart for a psycho. He combined the blood and body, wine and host into one. Thrifty bastard.”
Fuji dropped the sandwich onto the ground and hurried to Thackery’s side thirty feet down the quarry beach. The machine to enhance Charlie’s energy and pull him through the ether to dissipate was still at what they considered the best bet: Cannibal Caverns. But Thackery wanted to see me at work if, by random chance, Charlie tried to come through here. At least, that’s what he said, but I saw something needful behind his blank face. There was something more to wanting to watch me work, not that Thackery was sharing the why of it. I’d find out sooner or later, one way or the other.