having to worry about family members and friends sticking their noses where they didn’t belong.
However, there were still two loose ends that needed tying up before Edmund could begin: Rally, and that pesky little problem about what the police had found in the cellar. The latter resolved itself gradually, but neatly, and began with a brief meeting in the sheriff’s office to answer some questions about how much Edmund knew. Edmund played dumb, just shook his head and kept saying, “I had no idea,” and “I haven’t lived there since I was eighteen.”
No crime had been committed, the sheriff explained, other than illegal possession of a couple of controlled substances: opium and something called concentrated thujone.
“We had to bring all that over to the state lab in Raleigh,” the sheriff said. He was a tall, portly man with a moustache that Edmund thought made him look like a fat Adolf Hitler. “Looks like your grandfather was cooking up some kind of homemade absinthe. You ever heard of that stuff?”
“No, I haven’t,” Edmund replied.
“I didn’t either until this whole mess got dumped in my lap. Shit is illegal here in the States, but you can still get it in Europe, they tell me. Something you drink by dissolving sugar cubes in it until it looks all cloudy and shit. Christ, Eddie, I’m no expert on any of this—just going by what the lab is telling me. Shit is highly alcoholic—like over a hundred and twenty proof, they’re saying—and made primarily from this stuff called wormwood. Was popular among the French artsy-fartsies in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was thought to have some kind of hallucinogenic effects. But a lot of that’s been proven now to be bullshit. Anyway, I guess there’s a movement going on to legalize absinthe here in this country. Tastes like licorice, they say.”
“That would make sense,” Edmund said. “I remember the smell of licorice in the house when I was a kid. But my grandfather just called it moonshine. I guess the recipe had been in his family for years. The Lamberts originally hailed from New Orleans, and I remember him saying that his great-grandfather or somebody used to own some kind of saloon there.”
“The lab tells me your grandfather’s stuff was different, though. Had opium and that concentrated thujone and some other ingredients that could make it really dangerous if consumed too often.”
“You’re sure you don’t know where he got all that shit?” the sheriff asked.
“I’m sure,” Edmund said. “But I remember him saying a couple of times that he wanted to patent his moonshine and market it someday. This movement you’re telling me about here to legalize—what’s it called again?”
“Absinthe.”
“Absinthe,” Edmund repeated. “Well, maybe the old man had the same thing in mind. Maybe he was ahead of his time.”
“It all looks pretty innocent to me,” the sheriff said, chuckling. “He was making it in such small quantities. Clearly no intent to distribute. Christ, if I went around chasing every redneck cooking up moonshine for private consumption, I ’d be one hell of a lot skinnier, that’s for sure.” Edmund pretended to laugh. “And shit, last thing I need right now are the fucking Staties and the DEA breathing down my neck. Can’t prosecute a dead man last I checked. I only knew your grandfather superficially through Rally’s nephew. Other than this bullshit, he seemed to be an upstanding citizen as far as I can tell. Don’t know about you, but I ’d be happy if all this just went away.”
“Me, too,” Edmund said, smiling.
Edmund signed some papers that allowed the sheriff to retain Claude Lambert’s books indefinitely. He couldn’t tie them directly to the illicit absinthe production, he explained, as the books were mainly about botany and general chemistry. But still, he thought it best that Edmund sign a release in case everything came back to bite him in the ass. He made no mention of Claude Lambert’s notebooks.
But then there was the problem of Rally—a problem that resolved itself much more quickly and, for Edmund Lambert, much more satisfactorily.
“I want to talk to you in person,” Edmund said on the telephone the day after the funeral.
“About your meeting with the sheriff?” Rally replied. “You didn’t tell him I was involved, did you Eddie?”
Even though Rally was over eighty, upon his return from Iraq Edmund was surprised to see how frail and skinny he’d become since last he saw him—three years earlier, on a random visit to his boyhood home. And he looked skittish, too; his once bright, smiling eyes all wide and pink and seemingly incapable of holding Edmund’s gaze for long.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Edmund said. “Don’t worry about that. But I want to talk to you about the General.”
“The who?”
Edmund was silent for a moment, then whispered,
More silence, this time from Rally.
“When you coming by?” the old man asked finally.
“Now.”
“Makes sense,” Rally said, distantly. “I reckon it was only a matter of time.”
Edmund noticed the tension in his voice was gone—he sounded more like the Rally he used to know—but before Edmund could respond, Rally hung up.
Edmund arrived at Rally’s twenty minutes later.
The old man lived alone in a double-wide on what he often bragged added up to ten acres of “primo farmland.” Most of the land, however, was uncultivated, and the trailer itself was set back about a hundred yards off the road against a thick swath of trees. For as long as Edmund could remember, Rally had said that someday he was going to build his dream house there. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it, Claude Lambert used to say. But for some reason, the old man never seemed in much of a hurry to get out of his trailer. Edmund suspected this was because Rally thought he didn’t need a house when he already had the Lamberts’ to hang around in.
Edmund parked his pickup beside Rally’s, his headlights scattering the more than two dozen cats that the old man allowed to roam free amid the junk that littered his property—old auto parts mostly, including the shell of a beat-up Chevy Nova propped up on cinder blocks. Some of the cats, Edmund knew, were former residents of his grandfather’s tobacco farm; others, most likely their offspring. Rally had often adopted them over the years, more so after Edmund joined the Army and Claude Lambert’s health began to decline.
There were no more cats now on the tobacco farm.
Edmund smiled at the memories of what he used to do to the cats way-back-when before his anointing. How stupid he’d been back then; how blind to the messages that were right there in front of him. And now, the fact that Rally’s cats were gathered out front to greet him when he arrived, well, surely this must be a message from Nergal, too.
Edmund exited his truck and climbed the three rickety steps that led up to Rally’s screen door. The inside door was open a crack, and Edmund could see a light on in the living area. He knocked. No answer.
A pair of cats began meowing and rubbing against his legs.
Edmund knocked again. “Rally?” he called. “Hey, Rally, it’s Edmund.”
No answer.
Edmund kicked the cats away, opened the door, and stepped inside.
He took in everything in less than a second. Nothing much had changed in the years since he last visited Rally’s trailer with his grandfather—the mess, the odor of mildew and burnt frozen dinners and motor oil, the junky sixties-style furniture, the racing pictures on the walls and the model automobiles on the mantel above the propane fireplace.
No, the only thing that was different was Rally himself.
The old man sat slumped in his La-Z-Boy—the shotgun still propped between his legs, his brains blown out all over the wall behind him.
Time suddenly slowed down for Edmund Lambert—his heart pounding, a faint ringing in his ears as the room
