The Black Train

you…”

“What?”

“Do you believe any of it, the lore, I mean?”

Her little cat-grin dropped a notch. “Yes.”

For some reason, the tone of her response gave him a chill. Is she jerking me around?

“You only ate a smidgen of your trout cake,” she noticed. “Do I have to go back to the kitchen and kick some ass?”

Collier chuckled. “No, they’re great. But I’m a sucker for a good story, and Mr. Sute got the best of me.”

“Mr. Sute…or Harwood Gast?”

“Well, both, I guess. But you know, last night you sounded kind of into it yourself.”

She shrugged again, and tossed her hair. “I’m a sucker for a good story, too. Just, please, don’t ask me if I’ve ever seen anything at the Gast House. It’d put me in a compromising position.”

She’s as bad as Sute, or do I just have a MANIPULATE ME sign on my head?

“Anyway, I have to go now, so I just came over to say ’bye.”

Collier was wracked. “I thought you worked till seven,” he almost exclaimed.

“I just got a call from one of my distributors. I have to drive up to Knoxville and pick up a hops order. I won’t be back for several hours, and I’m sure you can’t hang around till then.”

Shit! Collier was pissed. He’d been so busy listening to Sute’s ghost stories, he’d missed his chance to talk to her. “Damn, well. I’ll come by tomorrow and give you the release form.”

“That would be great,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Don’t thank me. You’re the one who makes the lager.” Collier’s mind blanked, and before he knew what he was saying, he’d already said it: “Maybe we could go out to dinner sometime…”

What! he thought. What did I just say? I didn’t ask h—

“Sure. How about tonight?”

Collier froze. “Uh, yeah, perfect.”

“Pick me up here at eight. ’Bye!”

Dominique whisked out the front door.

Collier felt like a parachutist who just stepped out of the plane. His face felt like it was glowing. I just asked her out…and she said yes!

He barely noticed when Sute’s bulk sat back down. Were the man’s eyes red? Either he’s allergic to something, Collier supposed, or the guy’s been crying.

“You okay, Mr. Sute?”

The man looked absolutely disconsolate. “Oh, yes, I just…I’ve got several personal quagmires, that I’m not quite sure how to deal with.” He ordered another big martini.

Well, that’s one way of dealing with it, Collier thought. Even during their discussion’s peak, Sute seemed haunted, even pining for something. Could it have something to do with Jiff?

Collier knew he shouldn’t but…“Oh, yeah, that’s another thing I was wondering about. The land. Yesterday when Jiff was showing me my room, I asked him about all that land around the town. It looks like perfectly good farmland to me. But Jiff says it hasn’t been cultivated in years.”

Sute swallowed hard, nodding. But the tactic had worked; both times the name Jiff had been mentioned, Sute reacted in his eyes—the same pained cast. It was everything he could do just to respond to the subject.

“The land hasn’t been cultivated, actually, since Harwood Gast’s death in 1862. It was great land, mind you, outstanding soil. There were rich, rich harvests of cotton, corn, and soybeans for as far as one could see.” Sute’s voice darkened. “If farmers grew crops there now…no one would eat them.”

“Because the land is cursed?” Collier posed. “As I recall…Jiff said something along those lines.”

Was Sute’s hand shaking?

“Of course, Jiff didn’t say that he personally believed the land was cursed,” Collier went on for effect. “Just that that’s part of the legend.”

“It is, very much so.” Sute finally composed himself. “People believe the land is tainted for what happened on it when Gast owned it. As the story goes, he executed a vast number of slaves on that land.”

“Really? So this is fact?”

“Exaggerated fact, more than likely. Based on my own research, perhaps thirty or forty slaves were executed, not the hundreds that the legend claims. But still, men were killed there.”

“Lynchings, in other words?”

“Yes, but not by hanging, which is the standard denotation. These men were slaves, of course, there was never any trial beforehand. Bear in mind, this was the era of Dred Scott—slaves, by law, were regarded as property, not citizens entitled to the rights granted by the Bill of Rights. Therefore, slaves accused of crimes never got their day in court. They were executed summarily anytime white men suspected them of something criminal.”

“Legal murder.”

“Oh, yes.”

“These slaves—what were they accused of?”

“Some sexual crime, almost exclusively. If a white woman willingly had sexual congress with a slave—the slave was guilty of rape. If a slave put his hands on a white woman, or even looked at her salaciously…same thing. A number of these accusations were made by none other than Penelope Gast herself. There were even some accounts of slaves rebuffing her advances, which infuriated her to the point that she’d swear the man either raped her or molested her. Instant execution. And of course we know that she had many, many willing liaisons with slaves, a few of which no doubt resulted in very unwanted pregnancies. The entire ordeal was ghastly. I doubt that any of the slaves killed were guilty of forcible rape—ever.”

Collier’s eyes narrowed. “If they weren’t hanged, how were these men executed?”

“They were dragged to death by horses, or sometimes butchered in place. And then they were beheaded while all of the other slaves were forced to watch. Harwood Gast very much believed in the principles of deterrence. The severed heads were mounted on stakes and simply left there, so to be visible, and some remained erected for years.”

Collier’s brow jumped. “Well, now I can see why superstitious people would believe the land was cursed.”

Sute’s martini was being drained in quick increments. “No, the beheadings weren’t the highlight. After the unfortunate slave was decapitated, his body was crushed by sledgehammers, minced by axes, and then hoed into the soil. How’s that for a ‘haunted field’ story?”

Collier’s stomach turned sour. Jesus. Gast was pureass psycho. He could make Genghis Khan look like Mickey Mouse. “Now I know why the locals call Gast the most evil man the town’s ever seen.”

“Essentially, everything Harwood Gast ever did was in some way motivated by evil.”

“Just building the railroad itself,” Collier added. “Solely to transport captured northern civilians to concentration camps—that kind of takes the cake, too.”

Sute popped a brow at what Collier had said.

Almost as if to reserve an additional comment.

Collier noticed that, too. That and the man’s distress—from some “personal quagmire”—made Collier think: I’d love to know what’s REALLY going on in this guy’s noggin…

“They say evil is relative,” Sute picked up when his next drink was done, “but I really don’t know.”

“Gast was insane.”

“I hope so. As for his wife, I’m not sure that she was really insane—just a sociopathic sex maniac is probably more like it.”

Collier laughed.

Over the course of their talk, Sute’s face looked as if it had aged ten years. Bags under his eyes dropped,