A Minister's Ghost Read online

  God Bless the Coen Brothers, I thought, picking up the CD cases, for making that movie.

  A few other bits of trash were around the cases: a crushed lipstick, several Diet Coke cans, a hairbrush. I thought they might have belonged to the girls too.

  Just as I was thinking that, the tracks thumped twice, not loudly but hard enough to make me jump. A second later the bell on the warning light by the crossing banged out a message that could have been heard in Vermont: a train was coming. I stepped well back from the tracks, could see the red lights flashing madly.

  Then the train blared out its horn and I dropped everything I had just picked up.

  The horn shot through the marrow at the center of my bones. I tried to get farther away from the tracks, but the rhododendrons proved a solid wall. I actually began to shiver a little, from the adrenaline or the cold I couldn’t tell.

  The train called out again, much closer this time, and the bell and lights on the warning pole seemed to intensify. The rails began to shake and the roar of train noise filled the air. I rarely consider praying, but just as the engine shot past, it occurred to me I might take it up. By my estimation it was going seven hundred miles an hour.

  Fear might have hyperbolized the estimate a little.

  I couldn’t move. The rush of wind that the train dragged along battered me, threw sticks and leaves and bits of trash at me. I folded my arms, lowered my head, and closed my eyes against the onslaught. It was a long train and the assault continued unabated.

  After what seemed an hour, the caboose finally shook and rumbled, and noise began to fade; the warning pole fell silent and red lights blinked off.

  I couldn’t help thinking about an old song called “In the Pines” with its declaration of the longest train in Georgia: “The engine passed at six o’clock and the cab went by at nine.”

  I let out a long breath, stooped to pick up the things I’d dropped, and headed back toward my truck.

  Well, the warning light works, I thought to myself, trying hard not to consider what a train like the one I’d just experienced would do to a Volkswagen stopped in its path.

  A moment later I dumped the CD cases, lipstick, cans, and hairbrush on the passenger seat when I got into my truck. I wasn’t sure where to go next, the local junkyard, where I knew Skidmore had had the Volkswagen taken, or the morgue. Neither seemed any good.

  Distant thunder encouraged the sky above to darken to charcoal, and the rain picked up a little. Unable to face the morgue, I started the truck and headed through town toward Waldrup’s Cash and Tow.

  Pine City seemed deserted in the rain, and even the courthouse looked empty. Cars were parked in front of one of the tourist shops, an imitation general store, but the customers were apparently huddled inside, unwilling to face the cold and damp.

  Waldrup’s was the only towing company in the county and would have made no money at all except for the addition of a thriving junkyard business. It served as a meeting place for teenaged boys with pretensions of automobile prowess. They bought spare parts and swapped fantastic lies about how fast they’d been going when the police caught them.

  Once you got any car over about forty on most of our roads, in fact, you’d be off the pavement, onto the shoulder, or flying down a mountain with little hope of stopping until you hit the valley floor. Anyone who said they’d taken those curves and slopes at more than fifty was lost, himself, to hyperbole.

  By the time I got to Waldrup’s, the rain had abated, though the sky had grown darker.

  The first thing I heard when I opened the door of my truck was a cracking adolescent voice saying, “One hundred and twenty, on two wheels, almost all the way.”

  Three skinny boys were standing around a wrecked Mustang, its hood up. I thought one of them might be Nickel Mathews, the cousin of Melissa, Skidmore’s deputy/secretary. All three of the boys were staring at the engine the way doctors study a patient on an operating table.

  “She’s gonna need a valve job,” one boy said quietly, “but I believe she’ll make it.”

  I walked by them without speaking. The yard occupied three acres, and every inch was covered with something that had once been automotive. The owner, E. P. Waldrup—whose initials did not stand for anything, and whose friends called him Eppie—was asleep in a sagging brown armchair ten feet from the Mustang, next to his “office.” He was decked out in his usual extralarge, grease-stained indigo coveralls. A man of considerable girth, he threatened to break the substantial chair in which he shifted, snoring.

  The office was a shack the size of an outhouse that held a desk, a phone, and seven hundred boxes of paperwork that no one in the universe could make sense of except Eppie himself. Beside him, stretched out between the office and a telephone pole, was a heavy metal clothesline wire hung with a bizarre array of metal car parts. That sculptural conglomeration of refuse was the main reason I knew Eppie Waldrup.

  Long ago this strange, uneducated man had constructed a rare musical instrument, a sort of junk xylophone. He’d strung up twenty-three various car parts on the metal clothesline just to the side of his one-room-shack office. These car parts hanging in the air were a kind of miracle. If he was in the right mood, and sober enough, he would treat the odd guest to a concert on those scraps of metal. There being no guest odder than I, Skidmore had persuaded him to perform for me several years previously, and I was enraptured. The sound had unearthly beauty. I had come back to record him twice.

  He played with two tire irons and moved, when he played, with a grace that belied his bulk. He was carried on wings of music. Each piece on his line was a perfectly tuned musical note; combined, they made almost two octaves. And he prided himself on his ability to play just about any song requested. I tried to stump him the first time I met him by suggesting he play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and he only had to thump out the first three bars or so before I conceded that he was playing the melody line perfectly, if a little slower than the norm.

  “You’ll have to do better than that, college boy,” he’d taunted me. “I got a education in music from my childhood piano teacher, Miss Phelps. Can’t nobody take that away from me.”

  Occupation and accent are not always indications of mental content.

  I had to remember not to be startled by the sound of Eppie’s voice. For reasons no one knew, it had never changed. Despite that he was over forty, past six feet tall, and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, he had a voice like Shirley Temple’s.

  I’d interviewed him twice as a kind of lunatic-fringe/primitive genius, a musical Howard Finster. Both times we’d had a good laugh at what his voice sounded like on tape. He seemed to have a sense of humor about everything in life, his own foibles included. I thought we liked each other in a casual way, and I was hoping he would tell me things that Skidmore might not, under the circumstances.

  I approached the armchair gingerly. If you woke up Eppie too quickly, he was liable to swing something at you or call his dog on you, which was worse. The dog, Bruno, was nowhere to be seen, but I knew it was lurking.

  I stopped five feet from the sleeping giant.

  “Professor Waldrup,” I announced.

  He smiled, eyes still closed.

  “Doc,” he squeaked. “That you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Christ.” He looked me up and down. “You look tired. Up all night?”

  The boys at the Mustang stopped talking so they could listen to us, but were still pretending to look at the car.

  “I came to see you,” I told him.

  I knew what a figure I must have cut, over six feet tall, hair prematurely white, skin pale from too much indoor thinking, and dressed in black. I always tried to give the illusion of having casually thrown on whatever it was I wore, but the truth was more embarrassing. I enjoyed presenting a strange image. The details and origins of that enjoyment provided a lifetime of introspective analysis.

  “You come to tape-record me playing something again?�
�� He sat up and blinked hard three times.

  “Sadly, no,” I said slowly.

  “Oh.” He sniffed, looked away, and shifted in his seat. “You come to see that Volkswagen I got back there.”

  I was always surprised at the leaps Eppie’s logic took, and the accuracy he enjoyed with them. He surmised that I was helping Skidmore with the accident investigation, as I had been known to do in the past.

  “Don’t get up,” I suggested, “just point.”

  “Naw,” he told me, twisting sideways in preparation to throw his bulk forward. “You gonna have some questions.”

  “You saw something questionable?”

  “Me?” He laughed. “No. But I know you. You can’t shut up with them questions.”

  “I have a lot to learn—” I grinned—“so I have to ask.”

  “That’s the damn truth,” he groaned, leaning forward.

  His hands strained on the arms of the chair, turned white as he pushed himself up and away, launching himself in my direction.

  I followed behind him as we rounded the office. The boys allowed themselves to watch us, silent.

  I cleared the corner and was stopped in my tracks by the gnarl of orange metal that sat in cleared space with police tape around it. It looked like a giant, crumpled autumn leaf.

  The next thing that struck me was that one of the doors was completely ripped in half, as if a chain saw had torn into it.

  Eppie leaned against the back side of the shack and I approached the wreck, a little light-headed.

  “Train ripped the door like that?” I managed.

  “The police did that, or fire department, one,” he said softly, “to get the bodies out.”

  The bodies. How could there have been anything left to get out? The car was a concave orange C, nearly two-dimensional. The engine had been ejected out the back end and was lying on the ground behind the wreck. The steering wheel had popped through the windshield. I couldn’t even image how that had happened.

  “Took ’em two hours to get the bodies out,” Eppie said, anticipating my line of thinking. “The good thing is, that curve in the tracks had the train slowed a little bit, I guess, and the direction of the hit pushed the car off the tracks so the train didn’t carry it all the way until it stopped.”

  “Where did the train stop, did they say?” I asked.

  “It didn’t completely come to a halt until it was past the old station.” He took a deep breath and started my way. “They told me it would have been a whole lot worse if the train had been going at full speed.”

  I turned toward him, glad to take my eyes off the wreck.

  “First, I don’t know how it could have been worse, but second, the train wasn’t going full speed when it hit? Who said that?”

  “Nobody.” Eppie shrugged. “But the train’s got to cut to near half speed to make that curve, don’t it?” He let his eyes drift in the direction of the wreck. “Still.”

  “Exactly.” I followed his gaze. “What made it slow down?”

  “They saw the car on the tracks?” Eppie ventured, roughing his curly brown hair with a thick hand.

  “No. I was just there. The way the tracks slope down in that direction, the engineer wouldn’t have seen anything until he was nearly into the crossing. But the girls would have heard the train coming.”

  “Or the crossing bell.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “It’s loud.”

  I tried to make myself go closer to the car, but couldn’t seem to get my legs to work. I was afraid I might see something inside that I wouldn’t want to see.

  Reading my mind or my face, Eppie cleared his throat.

  “The police had me wash out the car after they did all the technical crap,” he said. “Washed it out good. And when they left, I did the same thing. It’s pretty clean now.”

  “That’s an old VW,” I began slowly.

  “It is.”

  “It wouldn’t have a CD player.”

  “No,” he answered. “I don’t think it even had a radio. But definitely no CD.”

  “You wouldn’t know when the accident happened, would you?”

  “Well,” he offered, “let me see. They called me to come haul the wreck around one thirty. They said it took nearly two hours to get the girls out. But how long before the accident was reported and everybody got there, I have no idea.”

  I forced myself closer to the wreckage.

  Upon closer inspection, the interior of the car was battered but not entirely crushed. I could see the seats were folded but not destroyed, their springs poking out. There was, indeed, no radio in the car. The simple dashboard sported a primitive heating system based on blowing hot air from the engine into the car, and there was a cigarette lighter. Otherwise, it was bare. The gearshift had been bent in the direction of the driver’s seat, the steering wheel jutted at an odd angle out the front windshield. What caught my eye was the ignition, because it made me think of something.

  I backed away from the wreck.

  “No keys in the ignition?” I asked.

  “What?” he said, taking a step my way. “Keys?”

  “They’re not in the ignition.” I looked down. “Wouldn’t, ordinarily, the police leave the keys in the car, in case you needed them?”

  “Ain’t much I can do for this car,” Eppie said slowly. “Maybe the cops took them, or maybe the keys got knocked out when the train hit. You see what it did to the steering column.”

  “I do see,” I told him, though I wasn’t looking.

  I didn’t feel I could look at the wreckage for one more second, and I still had to go to the morgue.

  “Thanks, Eppie,” I sighed. “I’ll be back.”

  He was still cocking his head at the orange mass when I left the yard. The boys had gone; the rain was starting up again. The sky was bruised with rain clouds, and a cold wind snapped hair across my forehead.

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was visit the county morgue.

  Three

  Morgue might be too strong a word for the loose arrangement between the county and the Deveroe Brothers’ Funeral Parlor. All three brothers were barely smarter, collectively, than a butter knife. Still, they had taken over the town mortuary after the previous owner had been indicted on hundreds of counts of illegal improprieties including “misuse of a corpse,” a charge that would not bear much scrutiny on my part.

  The boys had managed to pass all their classes at mortuarial school, or wherever a person learns such a business. They’d been registered, certified, and bona fide for nearly six months, and their business seemed to be running smoothly.

  I remembered them only as wild boys whose main occupation was capturing feral swine and rounding up poisonous snakes for our more primitive church services. Still, the county allowed bodies to be taken to their one examination room for autopsy and for study to determine the cause of death in any questionable circumstance.

  The cause of the girls’ death was not in question, but because of the nature of the accident, a certificate from the county coroner had to be issued. So the girls were lying in state at the Deveroe Brothers’ Funeral Parlor in Blue Mountain.

  As my old green truck rattled over the highway toward the place, I tried to distract my mind. Was Skidmore really having an affair with his secretary? Would he really participate in such a cliché? Had I really told Lucinda that I loved her? Would that obligate me to accelerate the relationship? Alas, none of these thoughts worked as a distraction. The only image in my brain was a picture of two mangled bodies.

  It was close to noon when I finally pulled up to the parking area on the side of the yard at the Deveroes’. I was so reluctant to go in that I could barely find the strength to turn off the engine. Rain was thumping frenzied syncopations on the roof and hood of the truck, and I could just make out the funeral home through the downpour. I decided to sit a moment, hoping the rain would abate.

  All around, sheets of gray rain painted a melancholy veneer over ruby leaves in the
old oaks, obscuring their color, demanding a more muted hue to surround the old funeral parlor.

  Before I could reach for the door handle, I heard someone call my name; I made out a black shape moving toward me. Before I could see who it was, I heard Donny Deveroe’s voice.

  “Stay right there, Doc,” he demanded. “I got you.”

  A moment later he was beside the truck, huge black umbrella sprouted above his head, opening my cab door for me.

  “Saw you pull up,” he said. “Thought you might like to stay a little dry.”

  Donny was the size of a linebacker, but his face was scrubbed and cherubic, his brown hair slicked back, and he wore a clean black suit. I’d never seen him in anything but overalls, and for a moment I thought he might be a distant relative of the boy I knew, that I’d mistaken him for Donny.

  “All part of the service,” Donny said cheerfully.

  I managed to pocket my keys and climb out of the truck under the protection of the skillfully handled umbrella, keeping its wrangler amazingly dry in the torrent.

  “Donny?” I finally asked.

  “Yup,” he said as we headed for the front porch. “It’s me, all right.”

  “That suit looks good.”

  “I know,” he said proudly. “Truvy picked it out.”

  Truevine Deveroe was the only sister in the bunch, our local witch until she and her husband, Able Carter, had moved away to Athens, Georgia, so that Truevine could get her GED and then go to the university there.

  I climbed out of the truck and under the protection of Donny’s umbrella; we headed for the porch of the funeral home.

  “What do you hear from your sister?” I asked.

  “She’s good,” he said hesitantly. “But she and Able still ain’t had no baby yet. That worries me.”