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

  “Now I understand,” I told her, sitting back. “Able’s missing, too; is that right?”

  “The first place Skidmore checked after he found Truevine’s empty bed was Able’s house in town. Nobody had slept there; Able didn’t show up at work this morning. They’re both gone.”

  I could see in my mind’s eye each Deveroe brother coming to a different conclusion: (1) she had run off and gotten married; (2) Able had kidnapped her; (3) Able had murdered her in anger and disappeared. Their solution, however, was unanimous. Able Carter was to die.

  “The Deveroe brothers are out for blood now,” she said, confirming my supposition.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Find Able, honey. And Truevine, of course.” She lowered her voice to a whisper again. “I can’t have nobody shooting up my kin, Fever.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Linda, but isn’t this really a job for your husband?”

  “You help him.” That was all.

  I knew from experience that I could spend hours trying to draw out more facts from her. I took a simpler tack.

  “All right,” I promised.

  “And come over to dinner tomorrow night,” she said, her voice returning to normal. “Bring Andrews.” She hung up.

  I looked over at Andrews. He was staring at the television trying to read Peter Cushing’s all-too-thin lips.

  “That was Girlinda. We’re invited to dinner tomorrow.” I picked up the remote and the sound of the movie resumed. “Able and the Deveroe girl are missing. We have to find them.”

  “So Linda’s premonition was on,” he said lazily, still glued to the screen.

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” I admitted.

  “Maybe they’re holed up somewhere apologizing to each other the way I hear some young people do.” His eyes drifted my way. “I mean, witchy sex has got to be difficult to pass up.”

  A woman screamed on the television, backing away from a leering Peter Lorre.

  “So do you mind if I do a little looking around tomorrow?” I asked him. “I’d like to help out if I can.”

  “You mean with my being here and on vacation?” He sat forward. “It’ll be fun: tromping through the woods looking for Romeo and Ghouliet.”

  The television screamed again.

  “What is this?” My eyes darted to the screen. “There’s not a screaming woman in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’”

  “Not as such,” he agreed, settling back, “but in great literature the woman is always implied. Speaking of same, where is your sometime girlfriend, Lucinda? You told me, I know; I just don’t remember.”

  “Birmingham,” I muttered absently, standing. “Hospital thing.”

  “When are you two getting married?” he teased.

  “Shut up; would you mind?”

  “You always avoid the subject.”

  “My parents’ union,” I said softly, “did little to promote the institution in my eyes, as I believe I’ve mentioned. What if I had a marriage like theirs?”

  “Fair enough,” he said, and let it go.

  The sun was going down and I thought to open our first bottle of wine for the evening. Out the kitchen window the green of the woods was turning gray, the sky fading into red dusk.

  The woods were beginning their sunset transformation from all that was stated by daylight into everything the darkness implied.

  Three drunken boys discovered the body next morning. It was broken, dressed only in blood, facedown in a culvert near my home. They stood near the top of the ridge laughing at the naked corpse.

  I found myself amazed by the casual cruelty of these boys, puzzled and repelled. Their laughter had drawn me from my bed at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, barely light in the bite of October sunrise.

  We stood on a path as familiar to me as my dreams. I’d walked it daily when I was a boy, nearly as often since I’d returned to the mountains. Rising up from the other side of the ravine was the behemoth of Blue Mountain, a shoulder against which the sky rested. The path ran along the edge, provided the only way around the mountain. On the other side the land sloped downward to the valley and the town. From where we stood we could already see day spreading silver over lakes, gold onto evergreens. A panic of autumnal loss exploded everywhere; leaves of burgundy and pumpkin and cider made a calico covering for the valley deeps.

  “Thanks for calling, Dev.” Deputy Needle zipped his coat. “God in heaven, what a mess.”

  “What killed him, can you tell?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Looks like somebody bashed his skull in. Plus he’s got a cracked rib—it’s all purple; you can see the bone. There’s some bits of thread up under his fingernails, like maybe he grabbed somebody. Could be something.”

  I had been staring at the body for nearly twenty minutes. Andrews stood beside me watching strangers swarm a dead man not sixty yards from where he’d slept. Something on my face must have betrayed my thoughts; he took a step closer to me and spoke in low tones.

  “You knew him,” he said. “You knew the dead guy.”

  “When I was six or seven,” I began, straining to see the ashen face at the bottom of the slope as the deputies turned over the body, “I was walking along this very ridge. With older boys.” My eyes darted to the group of laughing teenagers. “About their age.”

  The morning was hard and clear. The cathedral of the sky arched into infinity above us; all the stained-glass leaves filtered sunlight over the ground around us. The deep ravine mimicked the sky exactly the way hell mimics heaven: a nearly equal though darker vision. In those cold shadows three other deputies moved and shifted, not entirely certain what to do. Murder was a stranger to Blue Mountain.

  “Go on,” Andrews prompted me, his accent only slightly out of place against the other voices.

  “We’d been squirrel hunting,” I said quietly. “One of the boys, a monster by the name of Harding Pinhurst the Third, found a bird’s nest in the lower branches of a dogwood tree.” I scoured the ravine, then pointed. “That one there, I think. Look how much bigger it is now. At any rate, he pulled it down and found five eggs. For no reason, he took one out and broke it open on a rock. Instead of runny egg, a nearly formed baby bird, slick and blind, came spilling out. He was delighted beyond reason. He began to poke at the thing with a stick, telling it to fly, shrieking with laughter. The other boys, some of the Deveroe clan whom you may remember from your last visit, were watching.”

  A sudden shock of October breeze sent a shower of red maple leaves toward the ground, raining around the body, echoing the blood.

  “I watched the bird’s beak open and close, those blind eyes. I couldn’t stand it, grabbed the nest, ran into the woods. I think I was crying. No telling how far away from the others I was when I hid the nest under a pile of pine straw, the remaining four eggs.”

  The policemen finished their work, at least for the moment, and were headed slowly back up the ravine to the path where we stood, finding footholds in ivy and granite. A nod from Deputy Needle and the men standing by the ambulance struggled down the same way, wrestling their stretcher with them as best they could.

  I blew out a short breath and was surprised to see that it made a ghost in the air around me. I hadn’t thought it that cold.

  “I knew I wasn’t really saving the eggs,” I whispered to Andrews. “Even if they hatched after that, they wouldn’t survive. I just didn’t want them to be dead with boys standing around laughing. They all called me ‘Birdy’ after that—for the rest of the school year.”

  “That’s not so bad,” Andrews offered.

  “You’re right.” I managed a smile. “When your given name is Fever, what nickname can sting?”

  Andrews watched the side of my face in the growing morning light.

  “Ask the question,” I allowed.

  “Waiting for you to go on,” Andrews said with an indulgent sigh. “But all right, why did you tell me your little bird man story?”

  “I had compl
etely forgotten the event.” I returned my attention to the corpse. “Until I looked at that. Who was he?”

  “You’re about to say.” Andrews knew me too well.

  “None other than Harding Pinhurst the Third, dead as I ever wished him.”

  The group of slack-mouthed monsters erupted in unexplained mirth once more.

  “That laughter,” I gave one last quick glance in their direction, “is a fitting epitaph for the likes of him.”

  “Able Carter done this; everybody knows it,” one of the boys blurted out to a passing policeman. “He get hung for sure—if Deveroe boys don’t get him first.” The boy was so drunk he was drooling, delirious from an all-night bout with distilled corn and icy air. “He kill that Truvy Deveroe; now he got her cousin.”

  “You don’t know she’s dead,” another beefy boy chimed in, jabbing a fist at the other’s arm.

  “She’s dead all right. Them Deveroe boys’ll kill Able good.” He twisted his face in my direction. “What’re you staring at, Goliath?”

  It always struck me as strange that anyone would make fun of my size. I could have broken him in half—were I the sort. Maybe it was the fact that my hair was prematurely white; they mistook me for an older man.

  “That’s Dr. Devilin,” one of the policemen chided.

  “I’n care,” he mumbled, softer. “Big albino freak.”

  “Why is the body naked?” Andrews whispered to me. “And did you know the dead man was the Deveroes’ cousin?”

  “Of course.” I glared at the drunken boys, willing them to silence. “As to why the clothes are gone, I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “God help Able Carter now,” Andrews said, watching the policemen try to muscle the teenagers away from the scene, “especially after what happened Thursday night.”

  “I think that’s a little different from what Girlinda and I talked about,” Skid finally allowed. “For one thing, she said Able and Truevine had a lovers’ spat. Didn’t say it had to do with Harding. Or maybe she did and I wasn’t listening.”

  Andrews shivered. He’d thrown on a T-shirt and his black jeans, wandered barefoot out of the house when he heard all the commotion, two hours earlier. His blond hair was a bird’s nest; he was nearly a foot taller than anyone else at the scene. He rubbed his arms, stood next to Skidmore wanting to ask a question. They’d become friendly during Andrews’s last visit to the mountains, but the deputy was in no way disposed to idle conversation.

  “What is it?” Skid asked, his face drained.

  “Why is the body naked?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, irritated.

  “And how did those drunks see it way down at the bottom of this ravine in the middle of the night?” Andrews went on. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious? Are you holding them?”

  Skidmore sighed. “It was a full moon and them kids has crawled all over these woods they whole lives. No, I’m not holding them. In fact, I’d like them as far away from me as possible.”

  “But—” Andrews protested.

  “Skid’s right,” I interrupted. “Those creatures are as cowardly as they are stupid. If they’d killed a man, they’d have vanished. They wouldn’t laugh; they’d hide.”

  “I guess,” Andrews said reluctantly. “But I don’t like what this mess does to our investigation.”

  I had to smile. Our investigation.

  “This does seem to complicate matters,” I agreed with Andrews, moving away from the edge of the path into a spot of early-morning sunlight. “Stand over here; it’s a little warmer.”

  I watched Skidmore as he walked a few feet from us to sit in the front seat of his squad car. He began working on the initial written report. His squad car radio demanded attention; he talked shortly. After he hung up he looked even more tired. He was running for sheriff in the coming November elections; I thought it was taking a toll. His opponent was a local businessman who enjoyed deer hunting and thought it a significant qualification for the job. That candidacy was supported financially by Jackson Pinhurst, uncle of the deceased. Our Sheriff Maddox had died suddenly—dressed only in a red raincoat and saddle oxfords, in the arms of another man’s wife. There wasn’t much open discussion of it.

  Skid deserved to win. No one knew more about Blue Mountain or cared half as much. His spirit was clear and his determination to do right belonged in another century, but the politics wore on him, choosing a slogan, campaign colors, making a list of promises.

  “Dev!” he called, standing up.

  I yawned.

  “Linda told me she called you last night,” he said, tossing his clipboard onto the seat.

  “She wanted me to help find Able.”

  “I know,” he complained. “But the thing is you got to stay out of it for the most part. They say it looks bad for me to have help on a thing like this.”

  I felt the word they, in this particular case, meant one Tommy Tineeta, Skid’s campaign manager from Rabun Gap.

  “Of course I don’t want to get in the way.” I smiled. “Tell Tommy I said hello.”

  “That ain’t it,” he shot back. “Shut up.”

  The hospital employees had gotten the body on the stretcher and were making their way back up the slope toward the ambulance.

  “I just want you to keep a low profile,” he concluded.

  “I’ve come home to do research,” I said. “Everyone knows that. They’re familiar with the kind of work I’m doing, know it involves talking to everyone. What would be the harm if I asked a few extra questions in the course of my folklore interviews?”

  “Something like that,” he agreed.

  “That way Tommy T. won’t make your campaign more miserable than it already is.”

  “Mr. Tineeta is a smart man, Dev.” But Skid hardly sounded convinced.

  “He’s a transplant from New Orleans, he claims,” I explained to Andrews. “Sounds more New Jersey to me. Skidmore’s campaign manager.” Skid had only hired him in reaction to his opponent’s boss. Jackson Pinhurst was our town power broker, Boss Tweed in discount Armani suits, cigar like a smokestack, eyebrows like a hedge.

  “Running for sheriff,” Skid told Andrews, shy for some reason.

  “Not a better man in the state for that job,” Andrews said, clutching his own elbows. “I’m freezing. I’m going back to the cabin. Can’t stop shivering.” He looked down the path to my place.

  “This ain’t right, Fever,” Skid said, watching the paramedics wrangle the body into the ambulance. “I never had to investigate a murder of somebody I knew. Not to mention I have no idea what we’ll do with the body after the autopsy.”

  “Call the Peaker family in Rabun County,” I suggested.

  “What are you two talking about?” Andrews rubbed his bare arms trying to warm himself, more irritated by the moment. “You have a funeral parlor here in town; I’ve driven by it.”

  “That’s the problem,” Skidmore said as the ambulance door slammed shut.

  “Harding Pinhurst,” I told Andrews, “was the only mortician we had in this county. The place you’re talking about was his.”

  Two

  The rest of Saturday was more typical of October in the mountains: it rained and no one else found a dead body.

  It had been a wet year in general; autumn foliage was everything the local businessmen could want. Cool air and fire leaves meant weekend visitors. In cities south of Blue Mountain it could still reach ninety in October, but I lit a fire at night in my cabin, shivered every morning waking up. Strangers from Atlanta filled the streets of town, buying $40 quilts for $200 and marveling at the food in Etta’s diner: fried okra, boiled field peas, iced tea one part water to two parts sugar.

  The town square had not changed in a hundred years. I left Blue Mountain at age sixteen, went to Burrison University, then Europe, returned to the States to run a folklore department, watched that department fade away. All the while my hometown took little notice, altered less. I found comfort in that, made my troubles less
significant, held the center of things together.

  Built around an antebellum courthouse and the obligatory Confederate Memorial statue, the town’s four streets, each a true direction of the compass, headed away from the center. They would all eventually wind up lost on some shadowy upward slope. Over one mountain southward, drivers might find their way back down to Dahlonega and pan for gold before heading on to Atlanta. Otherwise the roads led into a tangle of dirt and gravel that could keep strangers wandering for hours with no apparent aim or outcome. An open labyrinth, these roads served to protect us from prying tourists. My grandfather’s rocking chair is not your quaint antique. Strangers in these mountains were treated as coldly as rain in the morning. After dark they might find a warm place by the stove, grudging acceptance, and the most potent alcohol known to humankind. If they were lucky.

  Town square was filled with chestnut trees that crazed the air with a yellow too brilliant to see; the eye was forced away by the light. All around them the ground was littered with the dead leaves and the recollection of a hundred autumns past.

  Benches were unoccupied in the drizzle but sidewalks clattered and shopkeepers were courteous.

  There had already been a brief meeting of these businessmen: tight-lipped agreement to keep the murder quiet. Dying leaves are good for business, dead morticians less so.

  I sat in Etta’s place talking to Deputy Needle; Andrews had decided to sleep in. The noise of the place was as pungent as the smell. Thirty conversations intertwined, a knot in the air like muscadine vines. Seventeen vegetables, all cooked for three days and nights in half a gallon of fat, steamed the air. Every Formica table was occupied, all booths full. Skid and I sat at the counter on green stools, their chrome stems sprouting like mushrooms from the linoleum floor to the vinyl seats. Sunday dinner after church always packed the place.

  “I got to check on some lab work this morning, got some ideas. You’ll be going up to talk to Junie.” He swallowed the last of his cornbread muffin. “She’s always first on your list.”