Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

“Come in to the parlor. ” When they were seated on opposite sides of the fireplace, Sarah leaned close, taking Val’s hand. “I know you and Terry don’t get along that well…”

“That’s ancient history. ”

“No, it isn’t,” Sarah said, “but it’s good of you to say it. The point is, Terry loves Crow like a brother, and if I had to guess what he’s doing out there, he’s opening up to him about some stuff he should have told him weeks ago. You see…Terry has been having some problems. ” She paused. “Psychological problems. ” Val squeezed Sarah’s hand, and Sarah took a breath and plunged ahead. “Terry is telling Crow, and I need to tell someone, too, and I was going to call you a few days ago, and then all of this stuff happened with your dad, and the farm and all. ”

“It’s been bad for all of us, honey, but if you need to get something off your chest don’t worry about how I’m going to take it. Tell you the truth, right now I need to be somebody’s rock, if you know what I’m saying. I’m not good at being vulnerable—I need to be the strong one. That make sense?”

Sarah smiled and there were tears in her eyes. “Of course it does, Val. Sometimes I think you’re the toughest one of all of us. I know Crow thinks that, too; and it may surprise you to know, but so does Terry. ” She dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t know if he’s ever managed to say it, but he’s really sorry about what happened. He knows he betrayed you, he knows he broke your heart. It was a bad time for him and if he could take it back and make it right, he would, but sometimes Terry is wound so tight he doesn’t know how to reach people. Sure, he’s great at press conferences, but he’s never been very good at getting to the heart of things. You know that as well as anyone. ”

Val nodded, and thinking about the grudge she’d been holding for almost sixteen years she felt suddenly ashamed. She sighed, and then gave Sarah a rueful smile. “Okay, sweetie, as far as I’m concerned that stuff is ancient history. I’m officially calling a truce. ”

“Thank God,” Sarah said, and the relief was plain on her face, “because right now I need you to help me with what Terry’s going through. If you want to…if you can. ”

“Sarah…” Val said, squeezing her hand again. “We’re all in this together. ”

Sarah took another deep breath and let it out as a sigh, her eyes shifting from Val to the fire and then to her hands, which were wriggling and knotting in her lap. “It’s…well…I think Terry is losing his mind,” she said.

(4)

“More…like what?” Crow asked slowly.

It took Terry a full minute to make his mouth form the words. “Crow…my dead sister, Mandy’s been following me lately. ” When Crow’s mouth dropped open, Terry added, “And she’s been trying to get me to kill myself. ”

“Holy leaping ratshit!”

“How well you put it,” Terry said with a weak smile, but his voice cracked. He looked at the coffee in his cup, sighed, and emptied the cup over the rail, stood up without a word, and went inside. When he came out he had a bottle of Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale. He unscrewed the cap, tossed it out into the shadows, and took a long pull.

Crow forced himself to say, “Why, Terry? Why would Mandy want you dead?”

Terry pulled a chair close to the chaise longue and sat down, leaning his big forearms on his thighs, his blue eyes crackling with tension and fear, the beer bottle swaying like a plumb bob from his laced fingers. “Mandy is afraid that the beast is going to take over and that I’m going to become…”

“Become what?” Crow whispered. Icy hands were clamped around his spine.

Tears filled Terry’s eyes and for the first time Crow truly had a measure of the hell that his friend was in. “Crow…she thinks that if the beast takes over I’ll become just like Ubel Griswold. ”

Each of those words hit Crow over the heart like punches, and each one was a harder blow than anything Ruger had thrown at him. Ubel Griswold sends his regards. “Oh my God!” he croaked, when he found his voice. He steeled himself to ask, “Terry…I’ve asked you a dozen times since we were kids and you always blow me off…but how much do you remember of what happened to you and Mandy that day?”

Which is when Terry’s cell phone rang. The sound made Crow jump and spill his coffee all over Party Cat, who hissed and leapt up and ran out into the yard. As Crow jumped up to slap at the lukewarm stains spreading on his jeans, he heard one-half of the conversation. “Hello. Gus…yes, w

hat’s—? What? When? Jesus H. Christ, Gus…how did he get into the bloody hospital?” A pause. “Was anyone hurt? Well, thank God for that. No, I’m at home. I’ll…be there in just a few minutes. ”

Terry snapped his phone shut and stood with his eyes closed and one hand clapped over his head, fingers knotted in his hair as if he wanted to rip a handful of it out. He took an awkward step backward and staggered, but Crow darted forward and caught him before he fell. He helped Terry to the rail and took the phone out of his hand.

“Terry, what’s wrong?”

Terry Wolfe leaned on the rail, sucking in great lungfuls of air. “Is this never going to stop?” he asked the night. The crow in the tree cawed again, a little louder this time; then in a fractured voice he said, “Kenneth Boyd just broke into Pinelands Hospital and stole Karl Ruger’s body. ”

Crow felt as if someone has just punched all of the air out of his lungs. He opened his mouth, but there was nothing in his vocabulary to respond to that, so he stared at Terry as around them both the moon opened its mocking white eye and the dark silence roared.

Interlude

The Carby Place was one of those farms that would have been a delight for a wandering Tom Joad: ramshackle and down at the heels, but honest, and it grew crops that fed the family with just enough left over to bring in a few thousand a month. Every month it was a stretch to meet the bills, pay something on the mortgage, put clothes on the kids. There were only thirty such farms left in Pine Deep, and with inflation and the blight, soon there would be none. Gaither Carby knew that and still he managed to crawl out of bed every morning, pull on his work clothes, choke down a breakfast, and then lumber out to the fields to try and fight another battle in a lost war. He could sell out, and after the mortgage was settled there would be enough equity left to maybe buy a trailer home in Bensalem, and then maybe finish out life working some shit job until he was old enough to apply for social security. Either way he looked the road went nowhere.

Gaither Carby was the great-grandson of the Carby who had bought the land and built the farm. He was fifty-eight and looked seventy, with arthritis starting in his hands and steel pins in his left knee. He had the blocky build and thick, callused fingers, and the bleak fatalism of the heavily mortgaged man who was seeing everything his family had ever owned being gobbled up by the Pine Deep Farmer’s Bank. He knew it was an old story, repeated a thousand times a week across the country, and he knew that there was nothing unique or exceptional about him or his to elicit any kind of help. No Farm Aid, no Willie Nelson and Neil Young. He was going to lose the place within two or three years, and that would simply be that.

When the workday was finished, Carby came in from the fields, showered, ate dinner, and then went back outside for a smoke. Lily didn’t let him smoke in the house, and Jilly, his sixteen-year-old, always complained it made her ill. His boy, Tyler, never bitched about it, or about anything for that matter, but Carby seldom felt like fighting the same fight every day, so he took his pipe and went outside to walk the fence and think.

Tonight he wasn’t thinking at all about his money troubles, or what it was going to cost him to replace the head gasket on his battered Ford pickup. Tonight he couldn’t have cared less about the mortgage payment due on Wednesday or the fact that the sprinkler system on the western ten acres was older than he was and needed an overhaul. He didn’t care about the heating bill, the cost of day labor, or the fact that he’d recently discovered that his sixteen-year-old daughter was taking the Pill. Tonight he was thinking about what was going on in town. Yesterday he’d had lunch with Gus and some of the boys from town, and even though everyone was all laughs and buddy-buddy, he could see in their eyes that they were scared. Even Gus was scared. Killers running around, people dying. Carby was scared, too. So scared that he had unlocked the gun cabinet and made Tyler clean, oil, and load each rifle and shotgun, and then, with the whole family trailing along, he’d taken one long gun to each bedroom in the house, wrapped it in a pillowcase, and put in between mattress and box spring.