“Don’t swing on me like that, son.”
“Or what?”
His father’s powerful hand came up and flattened against Shad’s heart. Maybe they were just both after a fight, getting primal here the way it sometimes had to be when your hatred had nowhere to go except into the flesh of your flesh. But Pa’s eyes were clear and mournful and affectionate, and the anger quickly drained from Shad.
So close like this-another inch and he’d have been crying in the man’s arms, letting everything out that was locked inside.
He broke away and moved to the other end of the room. “Callie said that Mags believed somebody was in love with her. Maybe coming after her.”
“It was that Zeke Hester.”
“Not according to her. She said Zeke kept his distance.”
“You must’ve argued with her some on that, seeing what you did to him the other day.”
“I didn’t mind what happened, but I didn’t go looking for it either. He came at me and I put him down. But I don’t think he caused Megan any more trouble after that first fracas.”
“I don’t know who it could’ve been then. You think I wouldn’t notice a thing like that if I’d seen it? You believe I’m lying to you?”
His father had played him along, beginning with the phone call in prison.
Shad didn’t mind much. This had more to do with Pa’s devotion to his daughter and belief in his son than any need for vengeance or even resolution. Maybe, in some small way, it was supposed to be a gift.
“Why are you so afraid of that place?” Shad asked. He was a stupid detective. In the end all it came down to was asking the same questions and hoping someone took enough pity to give you a direct answer.
“We always been. Your mama was too. I don’t rightly know why, it’s just the way it always was.”
“M’am Luvell…”
“I can guess what she told you. She thinks ghosts and evil spirits stole her kin. I ain’t sayin’ she’s wrong. The fact is, all you hear about that place, it all might be true as the sunset. It’s a bad road. What else are you going to wind up with when you leave poor diseased folks up there to die? There’s murder up that way.” Pa’s gaze drew down on Shad, eyes dark as shale. “You hear me when you want to, so you hear me now. If you got to take a life to save your own, you do it.”
Shad pulled his chin back. “Pa?”
“You listen to your father and no more back talk. You make me proud, son. You always have. You handle your load better than I ever endured mine.” He stood and drifted into the shadows of the house. “Stay the night in your old room. You got reasons for everything you do, same as any of us. Mine come to me on occasion when I’m asleep. Maybe you’ll recollect some of yours tonight too.”
AT DAWN, HE ROSE FROM THE PORCH CHAIR. FOR some reason he felt closer to Megan outside, where he could stare into the night sky and look up the road at where she was buried.
Shad found his boots in the closet, remembered what Dave Fox had said about timber rattlers. He heard his father awake in his bedroom but the man didn’t come out.
As he drove away Lament loped after the car. It might be good to have a hound up in the hills, even one that was only a pup, but Shad feared that with this trouble coming the dog might be hurt, and he couldn’t bear to be the cause of that. You had to make an effort to save what was close to you, even if it was only a dog.
Shad drew up to the shadow of his mother’s tombstone angling down from the hill in the expanding sunlight.
But a compulsion overcame him and he slowed and parked directly in its path.
He turned and looked to the lonely field where the graves of Mama and Mags sat side by side.
Fighting for his calm once again, he shut his eyes and tried to center himself. He had to go with the eddy, find the flourishing current once more. Shad hunted through the blackness for any sign of his sister, struggling to listen for any whisper at the back of his skull.
Blood buffeted in his ears as his heart took on a new cadence, slowing, as if the tide of his pulse grew more idle.
Of course, you dissolve and dissipate this way.
He only barely realized he was holding his breath, with the abundant blue splashes streaked against the dark of his mind. Perspiration flowed and pooled at his collar as he fought to go deeper into himself. The cool coming back on, crafty and honey and invisible. Flux roaring on, towing him down the proper stream.
Suffocating himself until he heard the word.
Shad fell back against the car seat, sucking air. He stuck his head out, letting the wind fill his ears. Pellets of sweat splashed onto the dirt.
Sometimes you had to damn near die to find the next step on the path you had to take.
Nothing ever changed except Mags was dead. Shad reminded himself, feeling the sweet lift that the rage provided him.
He put the ’Stang into drive and headed for Gospel Trail Road, knowing that his enemy-whether the hills or the wraiths or someone hiding up there who also dreamed of blood-was waiting and smirking, urging him forward to meet at last, and mix their bad luck together into a new hellish brew.
PART II. The Jonah
Chapter Eleven
HE DROVE INTO THE MOUNTAINS ON THE BAD road, past the patch of ground where his sister’s body had lain in the darkness.
Heading north to Jonah Ridge and the old train trestle, Shad kept trying to see it the way it had once been. A hundred years ago, in a different life, he might’ve brought Elfie Danforth up here to go a’courtin’, a picnic basket on his arm, with her parents following at a respectful distance behind them.
But other scenes kept pushing in. Imagining how it must’ve been with the wagons carrying entire families up this way, dying from cholera or yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung onto the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life. Peace officers, doctors, and town fathers dragging their friends and neighbors up the trail. If only they’d trusted themselves enough to even attempt a quarantine, instead of carrying out their duties cold- heartedly. Driving up to the gorge to pitch their own kin off the cliffs.
You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear. Even now, if he missed his chance and wound up a casualty in the bramble forest, he hoped Dave would have sense enough not to list it as a “death by misadventure.”
Despite the ’Stang’s mass and power around him, his chest grew tight and his breath hitched. Already this journey was getting to him and he hadn’t even hit the outskirts of town. How the hell was he going to handle it on his own?
He decided to park and take the trail up by foot. He thought maybe he’d spot something-or something might spot him-that could prove to be useful. If he didn’t ever come back down, he hoped Tub Gattling would discover the car, get the window fixed and help Pa find another buyer. At least Shad’s ghost wouldn’t be stuck in the backseat for eternity. You had to take what good fortune you could get.
If he’d planned this pilgrimage through to the end, and if rationality held any small part of it, he would’ve packed a rucksack. Brought water and provisions, a flashlight, a compass. Shad looked back down the road at the
