“You’re not a caveman.”
“No. But traditionally—”
“I bet some of those cavewomen were totally tough mamas.” She opened the passenger door and got out of the car. “Is Elvis coming with us?”
Mr. Presley was no longer in the backseat. I don’t know where he goes when he’s not with me. Being a spirit, he can’t sing or play the guitar, and he can’t eat his favorite deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich even if he could get somebody to make one for him.
“He split,” I said, “he’s off ghosting somewhere,” and I got out of the car.
As she joined me at the entrance to the driveway, Stormy said, “Why Elvis and not Buddy Holly?”
“I don’t know.”
“Buddy Holly was twenty-three when he died. So young. You’d think he’d be more reluctant than Elvis to cross over.”
I said, “Buddy Holly went down in a plane crash one winter night. On the other hand, Elvis was sitting on a toilet when he died, maybe of an overdose, and he collapsed into a puddle of his own vomit.”
“So you’re saying maybe he lingers here out of mortification?”
“Not just that. But it’s conceivably a factor.”
As we followed the driveway into the cottonwood grove, she said, “I doubt that anyone on the Other Side cares how we died, only how we lived. Tell him that. I mean, if he comes around again.”
“He’ll come around. Even if he didn’t want me to help him cross over, he’d come around to stare moon-eyed at you.”
She was surprised. “He stares moon-eyed at me?”
“He’s in love with you, I think.”
“That’s kind of weird.”
“Regardless of his other faults, he was always a gentleman in life. He wouldn’t materialize in your bathroom and watch you naked in the shower or anything. Anyway, I guess I’m glad he’s dead, so I don’t have to compete with him.”
“If he wasn’t dead, he’d be like sixty-five. You being a quarter his age, he wouldn’t be much competition.”
“I wish you’d said any instead of much.”
She smiled and pinched my cheek. “Yes, my sweet griddle boy, I’m sure you do.”
We followed the oiled-dirt driveway only twenty feet or so into the woods before leaving it for the cover of the trees. I wanted to circle the house, staying in the woods, to reconnoiter it from every angle, before deciding on an approach.
This being the Mojave in spring, the day was warm, the air oven-dry and very still. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, and occasionally a bird took wing through the branches overhead, startled into flight.
I felt someone watching me, but that didn’t mean anything. Because of my paranormal abilities, because I had to make my way through the world of the living and the dead, I sometimes felt that I must be under observation by a hostile presence when in fact I wasn’t.
In a whisper, Stormy said, “I feel as if we’re being watched.”
To spare her the fear of being tracked by malevolent and unseen enemies, I said, “Watch out for rattlesnakes.”
Three
The house didn’t look like the place where Norman Bates dressed in his mother’s clothes and sharpened the cutlery with which he would stab women to death in the family motel. Neither was it constructed of gingerbread and gumdrops to lure unsuspecting children into the home of the woodland witch, there to be roasted in an oven.
The simple two-story residence was freshly painted white with pale-yellow trim. A swing on the front porch; basket ferns hanging from brass chains. A pair of bentwood rocking chairs on the back porch. Furnishing the green lawn were a birdbath, four ceramic garden gnomes seated at a table that was a giant ceramic mushroom, a half-dozen cast-concrete pastel-blue rabbits four or five times life-size, and a powder-blue wheelbarrow used as a planter that overflowed with vine geraniums offering a wealth of scarlet flowers.
If this had been Thanksgiving Day, I would have expected a Norman Rockwell grandmother to be standing at the open front door, costumed in a long apron over a gingham dress, a smear of flour on one cheek, waving to the arriving grandkids.
Deep in cottonwood shadows, Stormy said, “Creepy.”
“Megacreepy,” I agreed.
“Blue rabbits? What’re they supposed to be—the product of nuclear waste?”
“Bunny Godzillas,” I said.
“Are the gnomes playing poker?”
“I think they’re having tea.”
Wary of snakes, we continued through the trees until we could see up the back porch steps to the open kitchen door.
Stormy said, “Something’s lying in the doorway.”
I squinted and said, “Maybe a dead guy.”
“What dead guy?”
“Probably the meat-cleaver-in-the-neck dead guy.”
She tried using her cell phone again, but as before there was no service in this area. “I’m having second thoughts. Blue rabbits and now a corpse. Let’s drive someplace the phone works and call Chief Porter from there.”
As a chill crawled up my spine and stiffened the hairs on the nape of my neck, I said, “Too late.”
“This isn’t a stupid horror movie, odd one. It’s never too late to do the intelligent thing.”
“Someone in there needs our help right now. There’s no time to waste.”
“How do you know?”
“Intuition.”
“Yeah? Well, my intuition says we should leave this very minute or get a meat cleaver in the neck.”
“When I say intuition,” I reminded her, “I mean sixth sense. My intuition isn’t like yours. No offense intended.”
“I fall for a fry cook,” she said, “and find myself with a clairvoyant.”
“Clairvoyant isn’t the right word.”
“Is there a right word for you?”
“Maybe not,” I admitted.
Draperies or curtains covered most of the windows, and the house stood in silence, as if abandoned.
“She’ll die if we don’t go in there right now,” I said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know who or how or why, but I know we don’t have much time to save her.”
Whether or not fortune favored the bold, we crossed the lawn without darting from one point of cover to another. The four gnomes around the ceramic toadstool were neither playing poker nor having tea. Each of them held a beer stein, and judging by the expressions on their faces, the sole reason for their gathering was to drink themselves into a stupor.
Lying across the threshold between the porch and the kitchen was in fact the fortyish guy with the shaved head and the wide blue eyes, the same man whose anguished spirit had led us to this place. The cleaver had cut through his carotid artery, and he had bled onto the porch floor so recently that the pooled blood had not yet developed a skin.
To avoid tracking blood into the house, Stormy and I had to step on the dead man’s back and then between his splayed legs. I’m not an admirer of bearskin rugs, but at least all the squishy-gooey parts of the bruin have been long removed before it is cast down to be trod upon. From the cadaver’s torn throat issued rude wet noises that, it seemed to me, we deserved.
In the kitchen, Stormy brandished her stainless-steel baton, looking for a skull to fracture, and I snatched up a rolling pin that lay on a disk of pie dough, on the pastry-friendly marble slab inlaid in the butcher’s-block island. We were ready for anything now, unless the anything had a gun.
“Pigurines,” Stormy whispered.
Someone collected cute ceramic and glass and carved-wood pigs, which were lined up atop the refrigerator, peeking between bottles on the spice shelves, displayed on the windowsills, clustered on the center of the work island and on the dinette table. There were pigs in frock coats and bib overalls and Santa Claus costumes, in tuxedos and party dresses. Here a pig stood in mid-pirouette, and there a pig played a banjo.
Where the walls weren’t hung with cabinets and appliances, they featured framed needlepoint samplers wit
h decorative borders and clichés meant to comfort: Home Is Where the Heart Is, Sunshine Always Follows the Rain….
Abruptly the framed samplers rattled against the walls, and the pigs clinked against one another, as if a mild earthquake shook Pico Mundo.