The Amulet

  “Well, Miz Howell,” he said at last, “if I do find something—and there ain’t nothing in that pen but mud and blood—I’ll give you a call.”

  “Thank you, Mr.—”

  “Emmons. Morris Emmons.”

  “Mr. Emmons,” said Sarah, “you be sure and call me.” He nodded, and then Sarah said, “Well I guess, Becca, you and I had best get on up to the house and talk to Mr. Weaver a minute.”

  “He’s not there,” said Emmons quickly. “He’s seeing about the funeral. He went into Pine Cone this morning, but they was a shortage on coffins, and he had to drive over to Brundidge to get one. Won’t do that wood no good, getting bounced around in the back of a pickup truck. Nothing worse than a funeral where the coffin got all sorts of dents in it, like it’s been used before—”

  “Much obliged,” said Becca, cutting the man short. She and Sarah hurried back to the car, and got in. Becca quickly turned the engine over, and drove swiftly away from the Weaver barnyard.

  Chapter 44

  It had taken some time for Becca and Sarah to get out to the Weaver place, the conversation with Morris Em­mons was halting and slow (it is impossible to rush cer­tain country people, especially if they tend to distrust you), and the return trip was made with the lowering sun shining bright gold and still hot against the side of Sarah’s face.

  “Well,” said Becca, “you satisfied? That man said that there wasn’t no necklace round Miz Weaver’s neck when they pulled her out of the pen . . .”

  “He also said she didn’t have no neck—”

  “Oh!” cried Becca, “when you gone give up?! It’s not there, and she probably didn’t never even lay eyes on it. And if Dorothy Sims had it on her when she got run down, then it’s probably gone be buried with her in the coffin. You don’t need to think any more about it.”

  “I bet it was out there in that mud, come off her neck when the pig attacked her, and fell in the mud . . .” Sarah said thoughtfully.

  “So let it stay there! Not nobody is gone go out to Mr. Weaver’s place, and go trampling around in the pigpen looking for a piece of jewelry they don’t even know is there. It’s just as safe in that pigpen as it would be in Dorothy Sims’s coffin. So why don’t you just let it alone, Sarah?”

  “I would have thought it got burned up in the Coppage house. That’s ’xactly what I did think—and that’s what Jo Howell wanted us to think. But it didn’t. If it can get out of a burning house by itself, then it can get out of a pigpen. Or a coffin.”

  “What? Does it just fly out when we’re not looking? We turn our backs on the pigpen, and this necklace jumps up out of the mud? That’s just the craziest thing I ever heard of in my life!”

  “I don’t know,” replied Sarah. “I don’t know what it does. But I’m going to get it, and then I’m gone smash it to bitty pieces. But until I do, I don’t think that there’s a single person in this county that’s pure-and-teed safe!”

  “So what are you going to do now?” Becca asked.

  “I haven’t decided. I got to talk to Mr. Weaver. I’ll call him up, give him time to get back from Brundidge.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to at least wait till after the funeral?”

  “I waited till after the funeral for Dorothy Sims, and Dorothy Sims has now got a funeral of her own. I’ll call him when I get home. I guess he’s probably got a phone.”

  Becca paused, and then she said, “You gone let me know what you find out, aren’t you, Sarah?”

  Sarah turned to her friend. “You’re starting to believe in it, too, aren’t you?”

  Becca shook her head. “No, I’m not. I don’t want to. I won’t believe it till I have to. But you do, and as long as you do, then I’ll do what I can. I mean I’ll drive you around and all that.”

  “You gone be sorry you said that,” laughed Sarah. “I was just about to ask you if you would get up real early tomorrow morning with me, and let’s go back out to the Weaver place. I’m gone talk to the man tonight, and if he says he don’t mind, then I’m gone take a leaf rake out there, and go through that pigpen . . .”

  “You mean you are gone set foot in all that mud!” cried Becca.

  Sarah nodded. “But you don’t have to. I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I just want you to drive me out there before work. But I still got to talk to Mr. Weaver first, see what he says. If he says that Merle never had hold of that thing, then I’m not gone bother. Not much point then, I guess. But if he says his wife did have something like that, then somebody’s in trouble . . .”

  Sarah thanked Becca several times for having driven her out on the fruitless errand, and the two women paused at their respective back doors for an instant, waving to one another sadly across the top of the purple Pontiac, in the driveway.

  Sarah walked into the dusky kitchen slowly, hoping against hope that Jo would have begun preparations for supper that evening so that she wouldn’t have so much to do now, but when she turned on the light she saw that nothing at all had been done. Dishes from the afternoon meal had been stacked unwashed in the sink.

  Sarah didn’t even want to tell Jo and Dean that she was home. She wanted to have nothing to do with them. It was the death of Merle Weaver that upset her so, the strange and horrible destruction of this woman, who by all accounts was good and simple and completely unac­quainted with Jo Howell or Dean Howell, who had noth­ing at all to do with the Pine Cone Munitions Factory. But it was necessary that she inform Jo that she was there, so that she wouldn’t start calling Sheriff Garrett or anything like that. She stepped quickly through the living room, leaned briefly into the bedroom, and said, “I’m back!” with some small amount of entirely fabricated cheer.

  “Where you been?” Jo demanded. “You’re late!”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’ll tell you later. I got to get supper started . . .” She moved away, and knew that Jo Howell would be too lazy to follow her into the kitchen, where she might end up having to do something.

  Sarah turned on the water and washed the dishes, sadly thinking out the rest of the evening and the rest of her life, wondering what she should say to Jo; wonder­ing how she was going to survive an infinitude of days that were as wretched and horrible as this one.

  A thought occurred to Sarah that turned around all her ideas about the amulet. If it was Jo that had set all this evil into violent motion, then by destroying the amulet, the cause of it all, she would have her revenge on the old woman. Now suddenly Sarah was doubly anxious to find it, now she was willing to go to all lengths—to badger perfect strangers, go crawling about in pigpens, chase ambulances and police cars—so that she could put an end to Josephine Howell’s despicable plan.

  Sarah quickly finished the dishes and left them to dry in the rack. She cracked the door to the living room, to make sure that Jo was not there, and then went to the telephone by the refrigerator. The information operator gave her Jack Weaver’s telephone number, and she called the bereaved farmer.

  She apologized for disturbing him at such a bad time, told who she was, and why she had called.

  Jack Weaver was much too burdened with his own grief to find anything really strange in Sarah’s questions. And Merle was so much on his mind that he didn’t mind that Sarah wanted to talk about her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said limply, “I know what you’re talking about. That necklace thing we found out by the truck. We was right then in thinking that it came off the body of that poor woman we run down.”

  “What happened to it, Mr. Weaver?” asked Sarah in a voice that she tried to control.

  “It was that necklace that caused Merle to die,” the farmer stated in a flat, tired voice.

  Sarah was so shocked that she could not for a moment reply. “I’m so sorry,” she faltered at last.

  “She found it on the ground, and put it in her pocket. We were gone bring it back into town, thinking it might be buried with that woman. It was in Merle’s pocket when she was feeding the pigs, and it slipped out into the mud. She w
ent in after it and then Louise got her. Her pocket didn’t have no button on it,” the farmer explained pite­ously. “If she had had a button on her pocket then she’d have been alive today.”

  “Where’s the necklace now?” asked Sarah.

  “Didn’t never find it, I guess. Is it yours?” the farmer asked.

  “Sort of,” Sarah replied. “Would you mind,” she asked, “if I came out and looked for it?”

  “It’s not mine,” said the farmer, “it wasn’t Merle’s. It caused her death, and I don’t want no part of it. Do what you like, Miz Howell. Do whatever you want . . .”

  “Thank you, Mr. Weaver,” sighed Sarah. “I’m really sorry to have bothered you at a time like this.”

  “Don’t much matter,” said the farmer, and Sarah heard the receiver click softly.

  Chapter 45

  The phone call to the bereaved farmer had confirmed Sarah Howell’s worst suspicions: the amulet had been at the scene of this last, most recent death, and beyond that, the man even went so far as to blame it for his wife’s death. Sarah breathed heavily, at that moment hating her mother-in-law, hating her own husband as being somehow involved in these evil transactions.

  Sarah had turned out the lights in the kitchen, and made that terrible phone call in the darkness. Now she sat a few moments at the kitchen table, the light from the last quarter moon casting cold through the small window above the sink; she was mustering her strength and her thoughts.

  She sat, and even as she sat and thought she felt a change coming over her, inexorable and harsh—yet re­lieving. She was convinced now that not only was Josephine Howell, her mother-in-law, somehow mixed up in all the evil that had befallen these dozen people—an even dozen lives violently ended—but so was her husband. Sarah tried to tell herself that Dean could have had nothing to do with it, that his inert body with neither will, nor pleasure, nor defiance was incapable of contrib­uting to the engineering of this bizarre tangle of accident and murder. But she couldn’t accept that reasonable conclusion; she was certain that her husband was in­volved, and she knew it for gospel at the same time she was convinced that he could not move to the other side of the bed if he wanted to. She was not even sure he was capable of forming the desire. Dean Howell was so help­less he couldn’t hit the floor with his hat, but with his mother’s abetting assistance, he had somehow managed to slaughter twelve people in the past week, to avenge himself against the town of Pine Cone.

  Sarah dropped her head in her hands. She was crazy to think those things, crazy to sit in the darkness and ac­cuse her invalid vegetable husband of mass murder; out of her mind to see calculated, spiraling mayhem when there was only accident and not uncommon domestic homicide. She was crazy to think it, but there was no way any longer to believe anything else.

  She no longer loved Dean. With what she knew about him, how could she? Besides, it wasn’t Dean that had come back to her, but a breathing corpse, a sweating sack of warm lard surrounding a tube that ran from the top to the bottom, from the mouth to the rear end—and that was all. Josephine Howell, she was the crazy one, for sitting there all day talking to such a thing.

  Sarah at last admitted to herself that she no longer had a husband. That Pine Cone rifle had done worse than even what Jo credited it with. It had blown away not only Dean’s face, but it had torn off everything that was good in the man, leaving a rotting carcass of single-minded wickedness. Sarah was not even allowed the comfort of mourning the loss of her husband, for legally the man was still there: he had a Social Security number, and he occupied a certain space, and dozens of government forms had to be filled out with his name on them. And worst of all, he had the right to demand attention of her. The thing that lay in there on that bed, however, was no more Dean than if Sarah had stuffed a dozen dead cats in a pair of pajamas and arranged them on the bed to look like the figure of a man underneath the covers—and stuck a white gourd on the pillow for the head.

  Much of Sarah’s discomfort in the past week had come from the knowledge that she was fighting against Jo and Dean. She could reconcile herself to her war against Jo, for Sarah knew how wicked the woman could be, but it was very difficult to explain to her conscience her frenzied battle against the inert figure on the bed. How could she attack something that could not defend itself? If she were to leave off sticking mashed carrots into the black hole, then the rest of that loathsome body would shrivel and die, turn black and rot. She could roll it off the bed onto the hard tile floor, and it would be unable to climb up again. She could plunge Jo’s sewing scissors into its belly, and it would not be able to pull them out again. And she had tried to convince herself for weeks that this was the man she had married, this the man she loved when he went away to Fort Rucca, this the man for whose sake she had listened intently to all the news of the progress of the war in Asia. It didn’t work anymore.

  But what discomfort need she feel now? For whose sake should she hold back? For Jo’s and Dean’s? She believed them culpable, and if they were, then they de­served anything that might come to them for it. More importantly, she had an obligation to all the people in Pine Cone who might be put in danger if she did not re­trieve and destroy the amulet

  But what if Jo and Dean were entirely innocent? What if she really were just out of her mind—temporarily, un­derstandably, from all the strain, from overwork, from just having shared a house with Josephine Howell for the past two years? Then she could get herself into trouble. She might get Jo and Dean into trouble. At the very least she would be making a fool of herself, and probably of them too.

  Sarah considered these two sides of the question, but she knew that her decision was already made. She couldn’t take the chance; if she gave it all over, took the easy, blind way of ignoring all that she had seen and heard, then more people would die—and she would be more responsible. It was terrible that she had been so cowardly in not going up to Dorothy Sims right away—but at that time, she hadn’t been sure about the thing. It was all just a guess, a cloudy guess in her mind, and she had been working on intuition. Now it was still cloudy—exactly how the amulet worked, for instance, and where Jo had got it—but it was no longer a guess that the thing did work. And it would be inexcusable now for her not to work on that premise.

  But Sarah, once this great decision was behind her, asked herself a depressing, despairing question: what would come of her? She was sure to lose no matter what happened. She saw that it was possible that she would alienate the town, that at best would think that she was “touched” and wouldn’t be so careful of her feelings as was Becca Blair. If she were wrong in all of this, she was sure to anger Jo even more, and make the woman so dis­trustful of her that there would never be hope of stable truce between them. And even if under the best possible circumstances, nothing were changed at all—if the fears about the amulet subsided, if the people stopped dying, and if Jo never discovered what it was that Sarah was doing behind her back—she was still trudging through life with Dean strapped to her back, like two seventy-five pound bags of seed corn. Sarah considered ruefully that her twenty-first birthday wasn’t even for another month.

  Suddenly, Sarah had an image of herself in the Coppage house, upstairs, in one of the bedrooms (though she had never been there before). The house was on fire, and everywhere she turned the flames were neck-high, and they had the substance and smell of soft-boiling candy on the top of the stove: thick and syrupy. She turned and turned and tried to decide which of the four walls of flame she ought to try to jump through to safety, but failing to decide, she grew despairful as the fire crept closer to her all around.

  She shook her head forcibly; she had not been asleep, but nevertheless she had been dreaming. She sat still a few minutes longer, making sure that she was entirely awake. She hated having to think things out the way that she had, but in truth it was the only real way of making the hard decisions. She shrugged. It was then to be war against the amulet, and if necessary, against Jo and Dean. In this, there could be no more tho
ught or pity for herself, and for her situation. The only important thing was to make absolutely sure that no one else died.

  In a few minutes she rose, moved quickly through the living room, and softly opened the door to Dean’s bed­room. The light of a mercury lamp shone through the Venetian blinds of one window, across the body of her husband lying crossways on the bed. His head hung over the edge slightly. He looked like a corpse found in the desert, with bleached skin and a black, desiccated mouth. Jo was seated in her accustomed chair at the foot of the bed.

  “Dinner ready yet?” the woman said surlily.

  Sarah moved quietly into the darkened room.

  “Why you so late tonight?” her mother-in-law contin­ued. “Dean’s hungry. I’m hungry. Where were you?”

  Sarah did not answer. She turned on a small lamp on the dresser; it was of low wattage and covered by a shade of thick red material, but she and Jo both blinked several times, unaccustomed to the light.

  At first Sarah and Jo spoke in low voices, almost in whispers, out of consideration for Dean, who might well be asleep; but quickly they fell into normal voices, forget­ting his comfort and his presence.

  “Where were you?” Jo repeated.

  “Somebody else got hold of that amulet,” said Sarah quietly.

  Jo spoke quickly. “Who?” Her lips clamped shut after that, and Sarah could tell that she was thinking hard. Sarah did not immediately reply, and Jo refused to repeat the question. At last Sarah said, “The woman that run down Dorothy Sims on the Montgomery highway.”

  Jo chose her words carefully. “I thought it was a man that was driving the truck.”

  “It was,” said Sarah, “it was her husband that was driv­ing the truck. Merle Weaver was in the cab with him.”

  “Didn’t know ’em,” said Jo, recovered now from her momentary surprise.