The Witch's Grave: A Fever Devilin Mystery Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Also by

  Copyright Page

  The Witch’s Grave is dedicated,

  with true thanks,

  to these thirteen (a witch’s coven):

  Keith Kahla for poodle images

  Maria Carvainis for garden talk

  Frances Kuffel for a walk in Little Italy

  Jennifer Weltz for keeping on;

  The Edgar committee: Cara Blackó, Nageeba Davis, Dirk Wyle,

  Laura Joh Rowland, and John Westermann

  for letting Easy have the statue;

  Lee Nowell for constantly bewitching everything a go go

  and twice on Sundays;

  Bob and Barbara DePoy for candy corn;

  and Monica Starr, the April witch, wherever she may be.

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgment must be made to

  the Georgia Council for the Arts,

  the Georgia Folklife Program,

  and

  the Mary Roberts Reinhart Foundation

  for grants over the years

  that enabled research in the mountains,

  the fruits of which are a part of

  The Witch’s Grave.

  Those departed, gone before, sleep in peace, return no more. Some poor souls that peace ignore. The witch’s grave is an open door.

  —Folk, anonymous

  One

  No one expected violence at church, or the dead bodies that soon followed it. Services at Blue Mountain Methodist were among the more sedate in our county. No snakes, no rolling, no wild tearful confessionals, only a covered dish dinner the envy of angels. Panfried corn was my favorite. I knew Mrs. Nichols had taken the barbecue grill into her corn patch, started a hickory fire. She always bent the stalks over until the ears were touching the grill, snapped them off, let them roast for twenty minutes before peeling back the husks. Then she cut off the kernels with a butcher knife into a pan on top of the grill, milked the cob within an inch of its life, added sugar water and cumin. The corn was fried until it had absorbed all the water, covered, and left in the field to rest. The result is why God invented corn.

  “Andrews,” I said between mouthfuls, “you’ve got to taste this.”

  He’d made progress of his own: fried chicken livers all but gone, boiled squash disappearing. With Lucinda gone for the week, it had seemed the perfect time for a visit from my favorite Shakespeare scholar. Pale and blond, he stuck out everywhere he went, though as much because of his odd demeanor as his accent. His friendship had grown to mean more since I’d left Burrison University, though he was my closest colleague when I ran the folklore department there. This was his second visit to Blue Mountain, meant to be a peaceful stay in the hills of Habersham.

  “I can’t say much for the content of the service,” he muttered for my ears alone, “but if this is Christian food, sign me up.”

  Though raised Church of England in Manchester, Dr. Andrews fancied himself a druid. Still, his assessment of the Methodist worship was accurate. Compared to my friend Hezekiah Cotage’s lye-drinking Pentecostal performance—the only other religious ritual he’d attended with me in the mountains—the meeting we’d just seen was designed more to cure insomnia than sin.

  Regular Wednesday night prayer meeting had been changed to Thursday night in order to dedicate a brand-new addition to the church. I knew about the covered dish dinner and I thought Andrews would enjoy it. The crisp hall in the church basement was too well lit, linoleum floor too shiny, freshly painted cinder block walls bouncing sound everywhere like a bowling ball. Cheap acoustical ceiling tiles were milky, windowless walls bare. The people decorated the place. Though weeknight meetings were more casual than Sunday mornings, most men wore ties; nearly every woman was in a dress. Andrews alone sported a Hawaiian shirt, and I had refused to wear a tie since leaving the university.

  I could see Mrs. Nichols, across the room, waving and winking. She knew my weakness for her signature dish, wanted to make certain I acknowledged it. Satisfied with my facial display of ecstasy, she returned to her conversation cornering Pastor Davis.

  “What’s in the squash?” Andrews asked me, poking it around his plate with a fork. “Onions, I can see that, but what’s the sweet? It’s like dessert.”

  “Not onions,” I began disdainfully. “The Vidalia onion contains more sugar than a Red Delicious apple or a half a cup of honey.”

  Further lecture on the subject was cut short by an explosion of angry voices from the hallway.

  “I don’t care if he is your cousin; what he’s done is unbelievable!”

  “Able,” the woman’s voice answered softer, “this ain’t the place.”

  “Place! What’d I care where we are? I have a sworn duty.”

  “You have a pig head is what you have.”

  “Well, I guess you’d know about that,” Able shot back. “You’ve got four or five lying around your kitchen.”

  “You leave my brother’s work out of it!” Her voice rose.

  “You call that work? Stealing hogs?”

  The meeting hall had gone silent. Some busied themselves eating or clearing away their covered dish, but most gaped at the closed door hoping to hear more.

  “They don’t steal,” she said, teeth obviously clenched. “They catch wild swine, and it’s hard to do.”

  “We’re getting off the track. I’m telling you, my investigation is nearly done, and it don’t look good. I swear if he was here at church tonight, I’d ask him about it to his face.”

  “Investigation.” She forced out a laugh. “That ain’t your job and you know it.”

  “Sugar.” Able’s voice turned softer. “Don’t we have enough to worry about with the way folks talk about you?”

  “That’s it.” Her voice was muffled; she’d turned away and was leaving.

  “Damn it, Truevine!” Able roared.

  Footsteps clattered.

  “You get away from me, Able!”

  “Stand still and listen.”

  “Take your hands off me.”

  “Run away, then. I won’t chase after you this time!”

  A door slammed and the hallway was silent.

  “See,” Andrews said immediately. “Why can’t there be more of that sort of thing in the services here? I’d come every week.”

  Several around us grinned; the hall slowly returned to a semblance of its former character. Dishes were packed; people began to leave.

  “Do you know who they were?” Andrews said, setting down his clean plate on one of the tables nearby.

  “The man was Able Carter, Girlinda’s brother.” I helped myself to the last of Mrs. Nichols’s corn. “The woman was Truevine Deveroe, the boys’ sister.”

  “That’s right,” he remembered. “They had a sister.”

  Andrews knew about the wild brothers from his previous visit to the mountains, but he was better acquainted with Girlinda, Skidmore Needle’s sturdy wife. He’d visited her in the hospital when she’d been shot, eaten at her red aluminum kitchen table, flirted shamelessly with her seven-year-old daughter.

  But he didn’t know Truevine or Able.

  “Able is the county
coroner.” I filled my fork. “And Truevine is our local witch.”

  Andrews glared.

  “Seriously.” I set my plate down beside his. “She has all the qualities.”

  “There are qualities?”

  “In the twenty-first century,” I began, “there is no true folklore left in Appalachia, if our definition remains what it was in the twentieth: anything passed through time and space orally or by direct observation. This owing to the fact that there is no corner of the mountains now untouched by media. This renders all untainted ‘true folk’ phenomena extinct. Remnants of folk phenomenology linger. Any strange sight after midnight could still be evidence of ‘revenants,’ kin returned from the grave. Any shy girl with an unusual appearance and a solitary habit may still be called a witch.”

  Truevine Deveroe was a twenty-three-year-old orphan, raven-haired and dark-eyed, a Pre-Raphaelite madonna in oversize dresses and heavy work boots. Her family lived high up on the dark side of Blue Mountain, in a part of the woods even bats and wild swine avoided. Electricity came late to them, and running water was unimportant. Truevine had discovered two deep wells on their property the old-fashioned way. She found a Y-shaped birch branch, held the two ends, and let the third end lead her to water. She closed her eyes, felt the tug on her dousing agent, the simple wooden instrument she’d made, and walked in a trance directly to the site of their first well.

  She opened her eyes. “There,” she told her three older brothers, and they dug.

  She’d also been accused, as I’d heard it, of milking her neighbor’s cows by rags.

  It’s an easy process. Tear an old dress, visit the cows under a full moon, rub their udders with the rags, spit on the cows, say a secret phrase if you like, and go home. The next day you may hang the rags on your clothesline, pull on them, and milk will flow into your pail. The neighbor will be surprised his cows give only viscous saliva with a faint odor of tobacco, which farmers may interpret as a certain sign of witchery. Never mind that the same effect is produced when cows are fed a solitary diet of corn husks, a malady easily cured by any veterinarian.

  All she needed was two or three rumors and a shy heart. It didn’t take Truevine long to become the witch of Blue Mountain. She and Able made a pair walking down our streets. She took long strides and stood half a head taller; he walked faster, never looking up, shirttail always untucked, hair disheveled, a loosened tie around his neck. They were Gomez and Morticia Addams in small-town garb, a golden glow in their eyes that only appeared when they were together.

  “People don’t believe it,” Andrews said, wiping his hands on the front of his shirt, “that she’s actually a witch.”

  “Not for the most part,” I answered, “but it’s amusing to talk about.”

  “Unless you’re that girl,” he said, looking toward the empty hallway.

  At the end of the Thursday night meeting, climbing into my ancient pickup truck at the church, we were stopped by Girlinda Needle. She was toting a huge casserole dish, emptied of its broccoli soufflé. Wearing a flowered print knee-length dress, she looked more zaftig than usual. Her hair was in a bun, but loose strands were everywhere behind her head, like distracting children vying for attention.

  She had been married for nearly ten years to my best friend, the town deputy, Skidmore. They were more like relatives to me than my own family ever was. Her face, always flushed, radiated a distress that was rare to her features; unused muscles pulled her mouth in a frown.

  “Hey, sweetie,” she said, patting my hip, “where’s Lucinda at? You better think about marrying that girl one of these days.”

  “She’s out of town,” I answered, noting the distraction in Girlinda’s eyes. “Be back next week.”

  Under ordinary circumstances she would not have let the matter drop, continuing to grill me about my feelings for Lucinda as I grew increasingly uncomfortable. That night, something else was on her mind.

  “Dev,” she managed through tight lips, all her weight on one leg, leaning closer to my ear, “you got to look out for Able. He’s been in a stew these past few months, and I think he’s got into some kind of trouble.”

  “You don’t mean this argument tonight with Ms. Deveroe.”

  “Shoot, no,” she laughed. “They fight like that all the time.” A wink in Andrews’s direction. “Young love. Everything’s hot.”

  He looked down.

  “I’ll admit when they first got together,” she digressed, “I wasn’t wild about the idea. She’s a strange one, and Able’s a mess. But they been dating a good while now, and I’ve come to see she’s just what she is: sweet girl, shy—loves my brother, so she’s all right by me.”

  “Something else, then?” I asked her.

  “That’s right.” She got back on track. “Something to do with his work and he won’t talk to Skid about it, says he ain’t sure yet.”

  “About what?” Andrews said.

  “Won’t say,” she whispered, glancing up at the bright moon. “But it must be awful. Concerns a great many hereabouts, he said. It sure give me the shakes, what with him being county coroner and all.”

  “I thought that was like an administrative thing,” Andrews said, leaning on the car. “Coroner.”

  “He is a judicial officer,” I agreed, “but responsible for investigating any suspicious circumstances surrounding death in general. Originally a twelfth-century office, it existed primarily to maintain records and, I believe, take custody of royal property.”

  “Dev,” he complained.

  “Currently coroners determine the cause of death or, if there’s any doubt, hold an inquest.”

  “Inquest?” Andrews muttered before he could stop himself.

  Girlinda shook her head. “Why’d you ask?”

  “An inquest,” I continued, “is a process to discover the cause of any sudden or violent death. Witnesses are called, but suspects are not permitted to make a defense. It’s not a trial. Possible inquest findings include natural death, accidental death, suicide, murder—”

  “Can I go home with you?” Andrews begged Girlinda.

  “I ain’t the one who started him up. You’uns put something in the shoe bin?” She waved in the direction of the church’s collection for the needy, then began her way across the crowded parking lot toward her battered blue truck. “Anyway, you’ll keep an eye out!” she called over her shoulder.

  I assured her with a nod.

  “What’s she worried about?” Andrews turned to me.

  “I don’t know, but she has a sense about these things.”

  “Shoe bin?” He turned in the direction she’d pointed.

  “Were you asleep during the sermon?” I whispered, failing in my attempt not to make fun of the title, “‘I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet’?”

  “My mind did wander,” he admitted. “That’s what’s in the chicken wire bin over there?”

  “All new footwear,” I confirmed. “You need glasses.”

  Above our heads bare limbs, silhouetted against a huge moon, were ink spilled across yellow parchment. We listened to the percussion as wind blew across the roof of the church and upward toward the night.

  Cars pulled out of the lot and farewells receded into the darkness. I watched the empty hall.

  “What are you staring at?” Andrews sidled up to me, following my stare. “Did you see something?”

  “I thought so. Probably not.”

  “Trick of the moon.” He headed for the passenger side of my pickup. “The way the shadows move in this wind.”

  I fished in my jacket pocket for the keys. “I guess so.”

  A charcoal cloud covered the moon; wind wheezed like an organ bellows. We heard faint laughter. It was impossible to tell where it came from. Down the road some of the parishioners were walking home, but deeper in the woods, where shadows collected waiting to cover everything, something stirred up the leaves like the sound of running feet.

  Girlinda called me the next e
vening.

  “Dev,” she said, the clamor of her brood in the background, “you heard?”

  Andrews and I had spent a gloriously worthless day sleeping late, eschewing the shaving razor, cooking, talking about going fishing, napping, watching a Poe film festival on the old movie channel. He was on vacation, after all, and what sort of a host would I have been if I hadn’t joined him in his sloth? We hadn’t been out of the house.

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Truevine didn’t come home last night.”

  I sat up and motioned for Andrews to mute the television.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s the first night in her life she hadn’t been in bed by ten,” Girlinda said, her voice unusually high-pitched. “Her brothers were worried at five after, started drinking by ten-thirty. When midnight came, they loaded their rifles and went looking.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Just listen,” she insisted. “All Thursday night and into the wee hours of this morning them liquored-up Deveroe boys scoured the mountain between the church and their house. When the sun come up and they still hadn’t found her, they did something they generally try to avoid. They come to our house.”

  “I see.”

  “Two stood in the yard and one kicked at the front door. He was so drunk he didn’t realize he had to set down his rifle to knock. Woke us up. Skidmore went to the door with pistol in hand.”

  “The boys are generally harmless,” I ventured.

  “You didn’t see them boys, Dev,” she whispered. “They were armed and agitated. They said Truvy was gone and wanted Skid’s help.”

  “Did he go with them?”

  “He pointed out that all three of them had been looking for her and she might be back at home.”

  “So he got dressed and drove them back up to their house,” I guessed.

  “Uh-huh,” Girlinda went on, “but Truvy was gone. I wouldn’t call you about it except that this afternoon the Deveroes apparently heard the story about Truvy’s argument with Able at church last night.”