Mystery Walk

long wintry silences that sometimes stayed in the house for days at a time.

Billy gathered up his courage and knocked. The whisperings stopped. In the distance—out on the highway, he thought—he could hear another shriek like a ha'nt up in the Hawthorne cemetery. The door opened, and standing against the dim glow of a kerosene lamp was his father, pale and bleary-eyed, shrugging into his overcoat. 'Go back to bed, son,' John said.

'Are you goin' somewhere?'

'I have to go into town to see what those sirens are for. I want you to stay here with your mother, and I'll be back in a few . . .' He stopped speaking, listening to the fading echo of another siren.

Billy asked, 'Can I go too?'

'No,' John said firmly. 'You're to stay right here. I'll be back as soon as I find out,' he told Ramona, and she followed him with the oil lamp out into the front room. He unlatched the door, and when he opened it frost cracked on the hinges. Then John was walking toward his beat-up but still reliable 'fifty-five Oldsmobile, made up of different colors and different parts from several wrecked car dumps. Ice crystals seemed to hang in the air like sparks. He slipped behind the wheel, had to wake up the cold engine with a heavy foot on the gas, and then drove along the frozen dirt road to the main highway with a cloud of blue exhaust trailing behind. As soon as he turned onto the highway and started toward Hawthorne he could see the red comet flare of spinning lights. He knew with a sickening certainty that the police cars were parked in front of Dave Booker's house.

He felt numbed as he saw all the trooper cars and ambulances, and the dark human shapes standing out front. The Olds's headlights picked out an overcoated state trooper talking on his car radio; Hank Witherspoon and his wife Paula were standing nearby, wearing coats over their robes. They lived in the house closest to the Bookers. Lights blazed through the Bookers' windows, illuminating the bundled figures who went in and out through the open front door John stopped the car, leaned over, and rolled down his passenger window. 'Hank!' he called out. 'What's happened?'

Witherspoon and his wife were clinging to each other When the man turned, John saw that his face was gray, the eyes sick and glassy. Witherspoon made a whimpering sound, then he staggered away, bent double, and threw up into a steaming puddle on the icy concrete.

The trooper thrust a hawk-nosed face into the window. 'Move along, fella. We got more gawkers than we need.'

'I . . . just wanted to know what was goin' on. I live right down the highway, and I heard alt the commotion. ...'

'Are you related to the Booker family?'

'No, but . . . they're my friends. I thought maybe I could help, if . . .'

The trooper braced his Smokey the Bear hat to keep it from flying away in the wind. 'Move on,' he said, and then John's attention was caught by two white-coated men bringing a stretcher down the steps from the house; there was a brown blanket over the stretcher, preventing him from seeing who lay on it. A second stretcher was borne down the steps as well, this one covered with a bloody sheet. John felt the breath rasp in his lungs.

'Bring it on down!' the trooper shouted. 'Got another ambulance on the way from Fayette!'

The first stretcher was being shoved into the rear of an ambulance not ten feet away from where John sat; the second, covered with the bloodied sheet, was laid down on the ground almost opposite his window. The wind caught at the sheet, and suddenly a white arm fell out as if trying to hold the sheet in place. John clearly saw the wedding ring with its heart-shape of diamonds. He heard one of the attendants say, 'Holy Christ!' and the arm was shoved back underneath; it looked stiff and bloated and hard to manage.

'Bring 'em all down!' the trooper shouted.

'Please,' John said, and reached for the man's sleeve. 'Tell me what's happened!'

'They're all dead, mister. Every one of them.' He whacked the side of the Olds with his hand and shouted, 'Now get this damned piece of junk out of here!'

John pressed his foot to the accelerator. Another ambulance passed him before he turned off the highway for home.

4

The coals in the cast-iron stove at the rear of Curtis Peel's barbershop glowed as bright as newly spilled blood. Chairs had been pulled up in a circle around it, and five men sat in a blue shroud of smoke. There was only one barber chair at the front of the shop, a red-vinyl-padded monstrosity. It tilted backward to make shaving easier, and John Creekmore had always kidded Peel that he could cut hair, pull teeth, and shine shoes from that chair at the same time. A walnut Regulator clock rescued from the abandoned train depot lazily swung its brass pendulum. On the white tiled floor around the barber chair were straight brown snippets of Link Patterson's hair. Through the shop's plate-glass window the day was sunny but bone-chilling; from the distance, seeping in like the whine of an August mosquito, was the sound of saws at work up at the mill.

'Makes me sick to think about it,' Link Patterson said, breaking the silence. He regarded his cigarette, took one more good pull from it, and then crushed the butt in an Alabama Girl Peaches can on the floor at his side. His smooth brown hair was clipped short and sheened with Wildroot. He was a slim, good-natured man with a high, heavily lined forehead, dark introspective eyes, and a narrow bony chin. 'That man was crazy in the head all the time, and I saw him near about twice a week and I could never tell a thing was wrong! Makes you sick!'

'Yep,' Hiram Keller said, picking at his teeth with a chip of wood. He was all leathery old flesh and bones that popped like wet wood when he moved. Gray grizzled whiskers covered his face, and now he stretched his hands out toward the stove to warm them. 'Lord only knows what went on in that house last night. That pretty little girl. ...'

'Crazy as a drunk Indian.' Ralph Leighton's ponderous bulk shifted, bringing a groan from the chair; he leaned over and spat Bull of the Woods tobacco into a Dixie cup. He was a large man who had no sense of his size, and he could knock you down if he brushed against you on the sidewalk; he'd played football at Fayette County High twenty years before and had been a hometown hero until his knee popped like a broomstick at the bottom of a six-man pileup. He'd spent bitter years tilling soil and trying to figure out whose weight had snapped that knee, robbing him of a future in football. For all his size, his face seemed chiseled from stone, all sharp cutting edges. He had hooded gray eyes that now glanced incuriously toward the opposite side of the stove, at John Creekmore, to see if that comment had struck a nerve. It hadn't, and Leighton scowled inwardly; he'd always thought that maybe—just maybe—Creekmore had stepped on that knee himself for the pleasure of hearing it crack. 'Sure ain't gonna be no open coffins at the funeral home.'

'I must've cut that man's hair a hundred times.' Peel drew on a black pipe and shook his head, his small dark eyes narrowed in thought. 'Cut Will's hair, too. Can't say Booker was a friendly man, though. Cut his hair crew in summer, gave him a sidepart in winter Anybody hear tell when the funerals are going to be?'

'Somebody said tomorrow afternoon,' Link replied. 'I think they want to get those bodies in the ground fast.'

'Creekmore?' Leighton said quietly. 'You ain't speakin' much.'

John shrugged; a cigarette was burning down between his fingers, and now he drew from it and blew the smoke in the other man's direction.

'Well, you used to go fishing with Booker, didn't you? Seems you knew him better than us. What made him do it?'

'How should I know?' The tone of his voice betrayed his tension. 'I just fished with him, I wasn't his keeper.'

Ralph glanced around at the group and lifted his brows, 'John, you were his friend, weren't you? You should've known he was crazy long before now. . . .'

John's face reddened with anger 'You tryin' to blame me for it, Leighton? You best watch your mouth, if that's what you're tryin' to say!'

'He ain't tryin' to say anything, John,' Link said, and waved a hand in his direction. 'Get off that high horse before it throws you. Damn it, we're all tied up with nerves today.'

'Dave Booker had headaches, that's all I know,' John insisted, then lapsed into silence.

Curtis Peel relit his pipe and listened to the distant singing of the saws. This was the worst thing he'd ever