Newton paled. “You went back?”
“I had to see. Once I was up and around I had to feel the place, you know? I brought in the heavy equipment and we tore his house down. ” He laughed. “I even sowed the ground with salt. The swamp, too. But I don’t think it was necessary.
The place felt—I dunno . . . diminished. ”
“Still doesn’t feel right, though,” Val said. “I’ve been there, too. Once, to lay flowers in memory of Terry, Vince, and Frank. I won’t go back again. But to answer your earlier question . . . yes, we’ll stay there. We earned that right. ”
Crow reached over and took her hand, then gently kissed the hard ridge of her knuckles.
Jonatha lapsed into silence, but Newton said, “And you’ll keep Mike with you?”
“For as long as he wants to stay,” Crow said.
“Is there any sign of skeletal degeneration? Anything like that?”
Crow and Val shared a look. She said, “He doesn’t like to go for his tests. So far he looks strong . . . really strong, but I know that sometimes he’s in pain. ”
“What kind of pain?” Jonatha asked.
“He doesn’t talk about it,” Crow said. “Whatever it is, he just eats it, just deals. ”
Val looked at the sunlight through the leaves. “After the adoption went through we talked about moving away—we thought he’d want to—but he wants to stay even more than we do. He has a good job with Pinelands Reconstruction. He likes building; he likes making things whole again. He’s helping to rebuild the town. It’ll take years, you know, but you’d be amazed how many people want to move in and raise families there. It’s weird, but the place has really come alive. Property is selling for ridiculous amounts of money. ”
“It’ll be a different town, though,” said Crow. “New faces, new families. ”
“But it’s always going to be the ‘Most Haunted Town in America,’ ” reflected Newton.
A shadow passed over Crow’s face and he looked away at the geese and ducks and the bright sunlight glinting off the gently rippling water. It was only after he heard his children laughing as they chased a butterfly that the shadow gradually passed and for a moment he thought he heard the faintest echo of sweet, sad blues drifting on the breeze.
“Yeah,” he said very softly. “It’ll always be that. ”
4
It was just breaking dawn when he emerged from the forest near the farm
house. He trudged along, his feet heavy with exhaustion, his face haggard. There was a small cut above his left eye that still bled sluggishly and the shoulder of his black pullover was torn.
He crossed the fields where Val would soon be planting corn, turned onto the winding road, and plodded slowly toward the house. He was tired, but he wasn’t in a hurry. There was no more need for haste, the sun was already up, the night’s work was done.
On the back porch he stamped clumps of dried mud from his boots and slowly climbed the steps that led to his own back entrance to the house. Val and Crow understood his need for privacy, for a private entrance. At the door he stopped and leaned forward to sniff the strand of garlic bulbs. They were stale, the aroma faint. He tossed them over the railing into the yard. He’d replace them this afternoon.
There was always enough garlic around; Val saw to that.
Inside he unbuckled his army-surplus web belt and tossed it and the holstered Beretta onto the bed. He shrugged out of the shoulder sling that held his sword, a three-year-old Paul Chen original. The blade would have to be cleaned, but that could wait, too. Right now he was just too tired. He stripped off all his clothes, stuffed them into a hamper, and then stretched his aching muscles, ignoring the popping sounds from his joints. Mike was a big man, tall and muscular. The growth spurt that had started when he was sixteen had rocketed him up to six-three, and he suspected he might make it to six-four. Long hours with weights and punching bags, with Nordic-Trak and bicycles, had sculpted his physique into lean hardness. The last five years’ worth of boxing, wrestling, and jujutsu had given him quickness and balance and an economy of movement that made some people wonder if he was a dancer.
He padded into the bathroom and removed his contact lenses. They were tinted to make his eyes look blue—an ordinary blue. Without the lenses he avoided looking into the mirror whenever possible. He drank four glasses of tap water, turned on the shower, adjusted the temperature mix, and came back into his bedroom. He put an old Robert Johnson CD on the changer and turned the volume all the way up.
He opened a small cupboard. On the inside of one door was a chalkboard, the slate cluttered with numbers that had been chalked in and wiped out. The number 84, long since erased, could be seen faintly, just a ghost of a mark. The clearest number, the latest number, was 41. Mike used the side of his balled-up fist to wipe out that number, and with a piece of chalk he wrote 39. He set the chalk down, rubbed his weary and unsmiling face, and went back into the bathroom to scrub away the dirt and the blood and the memories of the night before.
AFTERWORD
If you’re reading this, then you’ve stuck with me for three long novels and I thank you. The Pine Deep Trilogy— Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song, and Bad Moon Rising—were a hell of a lot of fun to write. If you’re reading this without having first read this novel, I suggest you read no further until you’ve finish the book. There are some spoilers here and no author wants to ruin the fun in their own book.
At book signings and appearances I’m frequently asked how and why I chose to write this kind of story. The backstory for the books—the legend of the Vlkodlak of Serbia, the Gypsy legend of the dhampyr, and the different species of vampires—was something that I’ve been researching since I was a kid. You see, I had a very spooky grandmother.
She was born in the “old country,” which for her was Alsace Lorraine, on the border of France and Germany, but she was of Scottish ancestry. Maude Blanche Flavel, descendant of the MacDougall and Gunn clans of Scotland, grew up in the late 1800s during the last great era of folklore and supersti-tion. When she was forty she had my mother, and my mother was about forty when she had me. So by the time I was old enough to ask questions, Nanny (as we called her) was close to ninety years old.
I spent a lot of time with her, absolutely swept up in the folkloric tales of Western Europe. By the time I was twelve I was a little walking encyclopedia of ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night. My grandmother believed in all these things. For me, the jury’s still out, but I keep an open mind.