Claude took the money and tucked it into the wallet chained to his belt. He looked around at his guests, still trying to be sullen, but then he laughed. "My ma usually gets what she wants," he said. "I guess you figured that out by now."
7
The Boltons' byroad, Rural Star Route 2, eventually led to an actual highway: 190 out of Austin. Before it got that far, a dirt road--four lanes wide but now falling into disrepair--branched off to the right. It was marked by a billboard which was also falling into disrepair. It depicted a happy family descending a spiral staircase. They were holding up gas lanterns that showed their expressions of awe as they peered at the stalactites suspended high above them. The come-on line below the family read VISIT THE MARYSVILLE HOLE, ONE OF NATURE'S GREATEST WONDERS. Claude knew what it said from the old days, when he'd been a restless teenager stuck in Marysville, but in these new days all you could read was VISIT THE MARYSV and ATEST WONDERS. A wide strip, reading CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (itself faded), had been pasted over the rest.
A feeling of lightheadedness came over him as he drove by what local kids called (with knowing sniggers) the Road to the Hole, but it passed when he kicked the AC up a notch. Although he had protested, he was actually glad to be out of the house. That sense of being watched had faded away. He turned on the radio, tuned to Outlaw Country, got Waylon Jennings (the best!), and began to sing along.
Chicken dinners from Highway Heaven was maybe not such a bad idea. He could have a whole order of onion rings to himself, eating them on the way home while they were still hot and greasy.
8
Jack waited in his room at the Indian Motel, peering out between the drawn drapes, until he saw a van with a handicap plate pulling out onto the road. That had to be the old bag's ride. A blue SUV followed it, undoubtedly full of the meddlers down from Flint City.
When they were out of sight, Jack went up to the cafe, where he ate a meal and then inspected the items for sale. There was no aloe cream, and no sunblock, either, so he bought two bottles of water and a couple of outrageously overpriced bandannas. They wouldn't be much protection from the hot Texas sun, but better than nothing. He got in his truck and drove southwest, in the direction the meddlers had gone, until he came to the billboard and the road leading to the Marysville Hole. Here he turned in.
About four miles up, he came to a weather-worn little cabin standing in the middle of the road. It must have been a ticket booth when the Hole was a going concern, he supposed. The paint, once bright red, was now the faded pink of blood diluted in water. On the front was a sign reading ATTRACTION CLOSED, TURN BACK HERE. The road had been chained off beyond the ticket booth. Jack went around the chain, jouncing along the dirt hardpan, crunching tumbleweeds, swerving around sagebrush. The truck took a final bounce and then he was back on the road . . . if you could call it that. On this side of the chain it was your basic mess of weed-choked potholes and washouts that had never been filled in. His Ram--high-sprung and equipped with four-wheel drive--took the washouts easily, spitting dirt and stones from beneath its oversized tires.
Two slow miles and ten minutes later, he came to an acre or so of empty parking lot, the yellow lines of the spaces faded to ghosts, the asphalt cracked and heaved into plates. To the left, backed up against a steep brush-covered hill, was an abandoned gift shop with a fallen sign he had to read upside down: SOUVENIRS AND AUTHENTIC INDIAN CRAFTS. Straight ahead was the ruin of a wide cement walk leading to an opening in the hill. Well, once upon a time it had been an opening; now it was boarded over and plastered with signs reading KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and COUNTY SHERIFF PATROLS THIS AREA.
Right, Jack thought. They maybe take a swing-through once every February 29th.
Another crumbling road led away from the parking lot, past the gift shop. It went up one side of a slope and down the other. It took him first to a bunch of decrepit tourist cabins (also boarded up) and then on to some kind of service shed, where company vehicles and equipment had probably once been stored. There were more KEEP OUT signs on this, plus a cheery one that read WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES.
Jack parked his truck in the scant shade of this building. Before getting out, he tied one of the bandannas over his head (giving him a weird resemblance to the man Ralph had seen at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot). The other he fluffed around his neck to keep that fucking burn from getting worse. He keyed open the lockbox in the truckbed and reverently lifted out the gun case that contained his pride and joy: a Winchester .300 bolt-action, the same gun Chris Kyle had used to shoot all those ragheads (Jack had seen American Sniper eight times). With the Leupold VX-1 riflescope, he could hit a target at two thousand yards. Well, four out of six tries on a good day, and with no wind, and he didn't expect to be shooting at anywhere near that distance when the time came. If it came.
He spotted a few forgotten tools lying in the weeds, and appropriated a rusty pitchfork in case of rattlers. Behind the building, a path led up the back of the hill in which the entrance to the Hole was located. This side was rockier, not really a hill at all but an eroded bluff. There were a few beercans along the way, and several rocks had been tagged with things like SPANKY 11 and DOODAD WAS HERE.
Halfway up, another path split off, apparently circling back to the defunct gift shop and the parking lot. Here was a weather-worn, bullet-pocked wooden sign showing an Indian chief in full headdress. Below him was an arrow, the accompanying message so faded it was barely legible: BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. More recently, some wit had drawn a Magic Marker word balloon coming from the big chief's mouth. It read CAROLYN ALLEN SUCKS MY REDSKIN COCK.
This path was broader, but Jack had not come here to admire Native American art, so he continued upward. The climb was not particularly dangerous, but Jack's exercise over the last few years had mostly consisted of bending his elbow in various bars. By the time he was three-quarters of the way up, he was short of breath. His shirt and both bandannas were dark with sweat. He set the gun case and pitchfork down, then bent and gripped his knees until the dark specks dancing in front of his eyes disappeared and his heart rate returned to something like normal. He had come here to avoid a terrible death from the sort of ravenous, skin-eating cancer that had taken his mother. Dying of a myocardial infarction while trying to do that would be a bitter joke.
He started to straighten up, then paused, squinting. In the shade beneath an overhanging ledge, safe from the worst of the elements, there was more graffiti. But if these had been left by kids, they were long dead, and for many hundreds of years. One showed stick men with stick spears surrounding what might have been an antelope--something with horns, anyway. In another, stick men were standing in front of what looked like a tepee. In a third--almost too faded to make out--a stick man was standing over the prone body of another stick man, his spear raised in triumph.
Pictographs, Jack thought, and not even the best ones, according to the big chief back there. Kindergarten kids could do better, but they'll be here long after I'm gone. Especially if the cancer gets me.
The idea made him angry. He picked up a chunk of sharp rock and hammered at the pictographs until they were obliterated.
There, he thought. There, you dead fuckers. You're gone and I win.
It occurred to him that he might be going crazy . . . or had already gone. He pushed that away and resumed his climb. When he reached the top of the bluff, he found he had a fine view of the parking lot, the gift shop, and the boarded-up entrance to the Marysville Hole. His visitor with the tats on his fingers wasn't sure the meddlers would come here, but if they did, Jack was to handle them. Which he could do with the Winchester, he had no doubt of that. If they didn't come--if they just returned to Flint City after talking to the man they'd come to talk to--Jack's work would be done. Either way, the visitor assured him, Jack would be as good as new. No cancer.
What if he's lying? What if he can give it, but not take it away? Or what if it's not really there at all? What if he's not there? W
hat if you're just crazy?
These thoughts he also pushed away. He opened the gun case, took out the Winchester, and mounted the sight. It put the parking lot and the entrance to the cave right in front of him. If they came, they would be as big as the ticket booth he'd gone around.
Jack crawled into the shade of an overhanging rock (first checking for snakes, scorpions, or other wildlife) and had a drink of water, swallowing a couple of pep-pills with it. He added a toot from the four-gram bottle Cody had sold him (no freebies when it came to Colombian marching powder). Now it was just a stakeout, like dozens he'd been on during his career as a cop. He waited, dozing intermittently with the Winchester laid across his lap but always alert enough to detect movement, until the sun was low in the sky. Then he got to his feet, wincing at the stiffness in his muscles.
"Not coming," he said. "At least not today."
No, the man with the finger tattoos agreed. (Or Jack imagined he agreed.) But you'll be back here tomorrow, won't you?
Indeed he would. For a week, if that was what it took. A month, even.
He headed back down, moving carefully; the last thing he needed after hours in the hot sun was a busted ankle. He stowed his rifle in the lockbox, drank some more water from the bottle he'd left in the truck's cab (it was now tepid going on hot) and drove back to the highway, this time turning toward Tippit, where he might be able to buy some supplies: sunblock for sure. And vodka. Not too much, he had a responsibility to fulfil, but maybe enough so he could lie down on his crappy swaybacked bed without thinking about how that shoe had been pushed into his hand. Jesus, why had he ever gone out to that fucking barn in Canning Township?
He passed Claude Bolton's car going back the other way. Neither noticed the other.
9
"All right," Lovie Bolton said when Claude was down the road and out of sight. "What's this all about? What is it you didn't want my boy to hear?"
Yune ignored her for the moment, turning to the others. "The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office sent a couple of deputies out to look at the places Holly photographed. They found a pile of bloody clothes in that abandoned factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side. One of the items was an orderly's jacket with a tag reading PROPERTY OF HMU sewn into it."
"Heisman Memory Unit," Howie said. "When they analyze the blood on the clothes, what do you want to bet it turns out to be from one or both of the Howard girls?"
"Plus any fingerprints they find will belong to Heath Holmes," Alec added. "They may be blurry, if he'd started his change."
"Or not," Holly said. "We don't know how long the change takes, or even if it's the same every time."
"The sheriff up there has questions," Yune said. "I put him off. Considering what we might be dealing with, I hope I can put him off forever."
"You folks need to stop talking amongst yourselves and fill me in," Lovie said. "Please. I'm worried about my boy. He's as innocent as those other two men, and they are both dead."
"I understand your concern," Ralph said. "One minute. Holly, when you were filling the Boltons in on the ride from the airport, did you tell them about the graveyards? You didn't, did you?"
"No. Just hit the high spots, you said. So that's what I did."
"Oh, hold it," Lovie said. "Just hold the phone. There was a movie I saw when I was a girl in Laredo, one of those wrestling women movies--"
"Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster," Howie said. "We saw it. Ms. Gibney brought a copy. Not Academy Award material, but interesting, just the same."
"That was one of the ones Rosita Munoz was in," Lovie said. "The cholita luchadora. We all wanted to be her, me and my friends. I even dressed up like her one Halloween. My mother made my costume. That movie about the cuco was a scary one. There was a professor . . . or a scientist . . . I don't remember which, but El Cuco took his face, and when the luchadoras finally tracked him down, he was living in a crypt or a vault in the local graveyard. Isn't that how the story went?"
"Yes," Holly said, "because that's part of the legend, at least the Spanish version of it. The cuco sleeps with the dead. Like vampires are supposed to do."
"If this thing actually exists," Alec said, "it is a vampire, at least sort of. It needs blood to make the next link in the chain. To perpetuate itself."
Once again Ralph thought, Do you people hear yourselves? He liked Holly Gibney a lot, but he also wished he'd never met her. Thanks to her there was a war going on in his head, and he wished mightily for a truce.
Holly turned to Lovie. "That empty factory where the Ohio police found the bloody clothes is close to the graveyard where Heath Holmes and his parents are buried. More clothes were found in a barn not far from an old graveyard where some of Terry Maitland's ancestors are buried. So here's the question: Is there a graveyard close to here?"
Lovie considered. They waited. At last she said, "There's a boneyard in Plainville, but nothing in Marysville. Hell, we don't even have a church. There used to be one, Our Lady of Forgiveness, but it burned down twenty years ago."
"Shit," Howie muttered.
"How about a family plot?" Holly asked. "Sometimes people bury on their property, don't they?"
"Well, I don't know about other folks," the old lady said, "but we never had one. My momma and daddy are buried back in Laredo, and their momma and daddy, too. Way back it'd be Indiana, which is where my people migrated down from after the Civil War."
"What about your husband?" Howie asked.
"George? All his people were from Austin, and that's where he's buried, right next to his parents. I used to take the bus once in a while to visit him, usually on his birthday, took flowers and all, but since I got this goddam COPD, I haven't been."
"Well, I guess that's that," Yune said.
Lovie seemed not to hear. "I could sing, you know, back when I still had my wind. And I played guitar. I came to Austin from Laredo after high school, because of the music. Nashville South, they call it. I got a job in the paper factory on Brazos Street while I was waitin for my big break at the Carousel or the Broken Spoke or wherever. Makin envelopes. I never did get my big break, but I married the foreman. That was George. Never regretted it until he retired."
"I think we're drifting off the subject," Howie said.
"Let her talk," Ralph said. He had that little tingle, the feel of something coming. Still over the horizon, but yes, coming. "Go on, Mrs. Bolton."
She looked doubtfully at Howie, but when Holly nodded and smiled, Lovie smiled back, lit another cigarette, and went on.
"Well, after he got his thirty in and had his pension, George moved us out here to the back of beyond. Claude was just twelve--we had him late, long after we decided God wasn't going to give us no children. Claude never liked Marysville, missed the bright lights and his worthless friends--bad company was always my boy's downfall--and I didn't care for it much either at first, although I have come to enjoy the peace of it. When you get old, peace is about all you want. You folks might not believe that now, but you'll find out. And that idea of a family plot ain't such a bad one, now I think of it. I could do worse than going into the ground out back, but I s'pose Claude will end up dragging my meat and bones to Austin, so I can lay with my husband, like I did in life. Won't be long now, neither."
She coughed, looked at her cigarette with distaste, and buried it with the others in the overfilled ashtray, where it smoldered balefully.
"You know why we happened to end up in Marysville? George had the idea he was going to raise alpacas. After they died, which didn't take long, it was going to be goldendoodles. If you don't know, goldendoodles are a cross between golden retrievers and poodles. You think eeva-lution ever approved of a mix like that? I goddam doubt it. His brother put the notion in his head. No greater fool than Roger Bolton ever walked the earth, but George thought their fortunes was made. Roger moved down here with his family and the two of em went partners. Anyway, the goldendoodle pups died, just like the alpacas. George and me were a little tight for money
after that, but we had enough to get by. Roger, though, he poured his whole savings into that damn fool scheme. So he looked around for work and . . ."
She stopped, an expression of amazement dawning on her face.
"What about Roger?" Ralph asked.
"Damn," Lovie Bolton said. "I'm old, but that's no excuse. It was right in front of my face."
Ralph leaned forward and took one of her hands. "What are you talking about, Lovie?" Going to her first name, as he always eventually did in the interrogation room.
"Roger Bolton and his two sons--Claude's cousins--are buried not four miles from here, along with four other men. Or maybe 'twas five. And those children, of course, them twins." She shook her head slowly back and forth. "I was so mad when Claude got six months in Gatesville for stealing. And ashamed. That's when he started using drugs, you know. But I saw later it was God's mercy. Because if he'd been here, he would have been with them. Not his dad, by then George had already had two heart attacks and couldn't go, but Claude . . . yes, he would have been with them."
"Where?" Alec asked. He was leaning forward now, staring intently.
"The Marysville Hole," she said. "That's where those men died, and that's where they remain."
10
She told them it had been like the part in Tom Sawyer when Tom and Becky get lost in the cave, only Tom and Becky eventually got out. The Jamieson twins, just eleven years old, never did. Nor did those who tried to rescue them. The Marysville Hole took them all.
"That's where your brother-in-law got work after the dog business failed?" Ralph asked.
She nodded. "He'd done some explorin there--not in the public part, but on the Ahiga side--so when he applied, they hired him on as a guide quick as winkin. Him and the other guides used to take tourists down in groups of a dozen or so. It's the biggest cave in all of Texas, but the most popular part, what folks really wanted to see, was the main chamber. It was quite a place, all right. Like a cathedral. They called it the Chamber of Sound, because of the what-do-you-call-em, acoustics. One of the guides would stand at the bottom, four or five hundred feet down, and whisper the Pledge of Allegiance, and the people at the top would hear every word. Echoes seemed to go on forever. Also, the walls were covered with Indian drawings, I forget the word for em--"