Old Wounds (49 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vicki Lane has lived with her family on a mountain farm in North Carolina since 1975. She is at work on an addition to the saga of Elizabeth’s Marshall County.

Also by Vicki Lane

SIGNS IN THE BLOOD

ART’S BLOOD

And coming soon
from Dell

IN A DARK SEASON

If you enjoyed

Vicki Lane’s

OLD WOUNDS

you won’t want to miss any of her novels of suspense featuring Elizabeth Goodweather and Full Circle Farm. Look for them at your favorite bookseller.

And read on for an exciting early look at Vicki Lane’s next novel

IN A DARK SEASON

Coming soon from Dell

I
N A
D
ARK
S
EASON

Coming soon from Dell

1.

T
HE
M
ADWOMAN AND THE
H
OUSE

Friday, December 1

The madwoman whispered into the blue shadows of a wintry afternoon. Icy wind caught at her hair, loosing it to whip her cheeks and sting her half-closed eyes. She brushed back the long black strands and peered through the fragile railing of the upper porch. Below, the broad fieldstone walkway was dusted with white and the ancient boxwoods were capped with snow. Beyond the house, the terrain sloped to the railroad tracks and on down to the gray river where icy foam spattered on dark rocks and a perpetual roar filled the air.

Her thin hand clutched at the flimsy balustrade as, eyes fixed on the stony path far below, the madwoman began to pull herself to her feet. Behind her, a door rattled on its rusty hinges and slammed, only to creak open again.

She paused, feeling the house around her—feeling it waiting, crouching on its ledge above the swift-flowing river. The brown skeletons of the kudzu that draped the walls and chimneys rustled in a dry undertone, the once-lush vines diminished to a fine netting that meshed the peeling clapboards and spider-webbed the cracked and cloudy windowpanes. From every side, in its small mutterings and rustlings, the old house spoke.

None escape. None.

As the verdict throbbed in her ears, marking time with the pulse of blood, the madwoman began to feel her cautious way along the uneven planks of the second story porch. A loose board caught at her shoe and she staggered, putting out a thin hand to the wall where missing clapboards revealed a layer of brick-printed asphalt siding. The rough material curled back at the exposed seam, and she caught at the torn edge, tugging, peeling it away from the wood beneath. The siding ripped away to show the heart of the house—the original structure beneath the accretions of later years.

She stilled her trembling hands, splaying them against the massive chestnut logs.
A palimpsest, layer upon layer. If I could tear you down, board by board, log by log, would I then discover where the evil lies…or where it began?
Resting her forehead against the wood’s immovable curve, she allowed the memories to fill her: the history of the house, the subtext of her life.

The logs have seen it all.
Their story flowed into her, through her head and fingertips, as she leaned against them, breathing the dust-dry hint of fragrance.
The men who felled the trees and built this house, the drovers who passed this way, the farmers, the travelers, the men who took their money, the women who lured them…and Belle, so much of Belle remains. Her dark spirit pervades these logs, this house, this land. Why did I think that I and mine could escape it?

No answer came, only the mocking parade of memories. The thrum of blood in her ears grew louder and the madwoman turned her back on the exposed house wall and moved to the railing. Leaning out, oblivious to the cutting wind, she fixed her eyes on the stony path thirty feet below.
Far enough?
She hesitated, looking up and down the porch. A stack of plastic milk crates filled with black-mottled shapes caught her eye.

Of course, there would be a way. The house is seeing to it. Belle is making sure.

Snatching up the topmost crate, she lifted it to the porch railing. Mildew-speckled dried gourds tumbled down to shatter on the stones, scattering seeds over the path and frozen ground. The madwoman set the empty crate beside the balusters and slowly, painfully, pulled herself up to stand on its red grating-like surface. Then, holding to the nearest upright, she placed a tentative foot on the wide railing.

The words came to her, dredged from memory’s storehouse. When her own thoughts faltered, one of the poets spoke for her as they always did, one of the many whose works she had loved and learned and taught.

Balanced on the railing, the madwoman hurled the words into the wind’s face.

“‘After great pain a formal feeling comes—’”

She closed her eyes, willing herself to go on.

“‘The snow—

First chill, then stupor, then

The letting go.’”

The house waited.

2.

T
HREE
D
OLLS

Friday, December 1

As the car negotiated the twisting road down to the river, Elizabeth Goodweather saw them once more: three naked baby dolls, their pudgy bodies stained with age and weather, twisting and dancing in the winter wind like a grisly chorus line. They had hung there for as long as she could remember, dangling by their almost non-existent necks from the clothesline that sagged along the back porch of the old house called Gudger’s Stand.

The house lay below a curve so hairpin-sharp and a road so narrow that many travelers, intent on avoiding the deep ditch to one side and the sheer drop to the other, never noticed the house at all. It was easy to miss, lying as it did in a tangle of weedy brush and household garbage, perched well below the level of the pavement on a narrow bank that sloped away down to the river rapids.

I wish
I’d
never noticed it. It wasn’t until the power company cleared some of those big trees that you could even see the house.

Her first sight of the house and the grisly row of hanged dolls had been on a fall day some years ago.
Sam was still alive. He was driving and the girls were in the back seat….

The memory was sharp: the abrupt shock of the missing trees on the slope below the road; the sudden appearance of the hitherto-unseen house with its long porches front and back; the row of hanging dolls and the hunched old man sitting in a chair beneath them, belaboring their rubber bodies with his lifted cane.
And a woman just disappearing into the house; I only saw the tail of her skirt as she went through the door. The whole scene was bizarre—and unlike anything else I’d seen in Marshall County. I started to say something but then I couldn’t; it just seemed too awful—those helpless little dolls—I didn’t want the girls to see that old man hitting the dolls.

Ridiculous. Of course, the next time the girls had ridden the school bus some ghoulishly eager schoolmate had pointed out the newly visible house and the trio of dangling dolls. Rosemary and Laurel had come home cheerfully discussing the meaning behind the display.

“Shawn says it’s where old man Randall Revis lives—and that he’s had three wives and they’ve all run off. So old man Revis pretends the dolls are his ex-wives and he whacks them with his walking-stick.”

Rosemary’s matter-of-fact explanation, punctuated by slurps of ramen noodles, had been followed by her younger sister’s assertion that a girl on
her
bus had said the old man was a cannibal who lured children into his house and cut them up and put them in his big freezer.

“Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel! And every time he eats one, he hangs up another doll!” Laurel’s eyes had been wide but then she had smiled knowingly.

“That’s not true, is it, Mum? That girl was just trying to scare the little kids, wasn’t she?”

“That’s what it sounds like to me, Laurie.” Elizabeth had been quick to agree, adding a tentative explanation about a sick old man, not right in the head.

But really, the girls just took it in stride as one of those inexplicable things grownups do. I think they quit even seeing the house and the dolls. I wish I could have. For some reason I always have to look, and I’m always hoping that maybe the dolls or the cords holding them will have rotted and fallen away. Or that the kudzu will have finally taken the whole place. The old man’s been dead for years now; you’d think some one would have taken them down.

Elizabeth shuddered and forced her thoughts back to the here and now. Sam was dead; the girls were grown; it was Phillip Hawkins at the wheel of her car on this particular winter afternoon. But still the hanging dolls seemed to hold some implicit warning.

“What’s the matter, Lizabeth?” Without taking his eyes from the road, Phillip reached out to tug at her long braid. One-handed, he steered the jeep down the corkscrew road and toward the bridge that crossed the river at Gudger’s Stand. Snow plows had been out early and tarnished ridges of frozen white from the unseasonable storm of the previous night lined the road ahead.

She caught at his free hand, happy to be pulled from her uneasy reverie. “It’s just that old house—it always gives me the creeps.”

Phillip pulled into the deserted parking lot to the left of the road. For much of the year the flat area at the base of the bridge swarmed with kayakers, paddlers, and busloads of customers for the various whitewater rafting companies, but on this frigid day, it was deserted except for a pair of Canada Geese, fluffed out against the cold.

“That one up there?” Phillip wheeled the jeep in a tight circle, bringing it to a stop facing away from the river and toward the house.

She nodded. “That one. It’s as near to being a haunted house as anything we have around here—folks tell all kinds of creepy stories about things that happened there in the past—and ten years ago the old man who lived there was murdered in his bed. They’ve never found out who did it.”

They sat in the still-running car, gazing up the snow-covered slope at the dilapidated and abandoned house. Low-lying clouds washed the scene in grim tones of pale gray and faded brown.

“What’s that?” Elizabeth leaned closer to the windshield, pointing to a dark shape that seemed to quiver behind the railings at the end of the upper porch. “Do you see it…something moving up there?”

“Probably just something blowing in the wind.” Phillip followed her gaze. “One of those big black trash bags, maybe—”

“No, look!” Elizabeth frowned in an attempt to make sense of the dark form that had moved now to lean against the wall of the old house. “It’s a person! But what would anyone…I wish I could see—”

Phillip was already pulling out of the parking lot and toward the overgrown driveway that led up to the old house. And even as he said “Something’s not right here” the angular shape moved toward the porch railing. There was a flash of red and a tangle of rounded objects fell to the ground.

“I think it’s a woman.” Elizabeth craned her head to get a better look at the figure high above them. “What’s she doing…climbing up on something or…?” The question in her voice turned to horror. “Phillip! I think she’s going to jump!”

The car was halfway up the driveway when they were halted by a downed tree lying across the overgrown ruts. High above them they could see the woman balanced on the railing. Clinging to a porch pillar, she swayed in the wind.

Elizabeth shoved her door open and leaped from the car. Pulling on her jacket as she ran, she pounded up the steep drive, the climb made even slower by frozen mud and ice-covered puddles. Behind her she could hear the steady thud of Phillip’s boots. Ahead she could see the scarecrow form of the woman, still teetering on her precarious perch. The woman’s black hair writhed around her head, obscuring her face. A long black coat lofted out in the wind, making her look like some great bird preparing for flight.

“Stop!” Elizabeth’s voice was little more than a thin quaver against the wind and she took breath and tried again. “Please!…Wait!…Talk to us!”

This time her cry reached the woman on the railing, who turned at the sound. Her pale face stared at Elizabeth and her lips moved but the words, if there were words, were carried away by the pitiless wind.

Elizabeth gasped. “Nola!”

She tried to run faster, even as she shouted to the figure high above her. “It’s me, Nola—Elizabeth Goodweather. Please, get down from there before—”

The woman on the railing hesitated, wavered. Then she lifted her head as if listening to a far away sound.

“Just wait where you are, please! We’ll help you…” Elizabeth’s side was aching and her voice was a rasping croak, but she forced herself up the road and toward the old house. In the distance a siren began its urgent howl.

Phillip was at her side now, pointing to the stairs that led to the upper porch. “Keep talking to her; I’ll try to get up there.”

The siren was louder now, very near. Elizabeth kept moving toward the porch, breathless with fatigue.

“Nola, were you looking for the will you told me about? Let us help you.” She labored to be heard, to be understood, to get closer, to make eye contact with this woman she met only a short few weeks before. “Please, be careful; that railing looks—”

Above her the black-haired woman slowly shook her head. Elizabeth heard the emergency vehicle turn into the drive behind her. The siren shrieked once more and died away.

She turned to see a Marshall County sheriff’s car stopped just behind her jeep. Its light was still pulsing in blue rhythmic bursts as two men in uniform, followed by a smaller figure in jeans and a purple fleece jacket, emerged from its interior and began to race up the drive.

Whirling to see what effect this new arrival would have, Elizabeth was just in time to see the black-clad figure release her hold on the post, spread her arms wide, and plunge—a great raven tumbling from the sky.

“How the hell she survived that fall…just missed the stone walkway and landed on one of those old boxwoods.”

The EMTs had responded quickly, strapping the crumpled, unconscious body of Miss Nola Barrett to a backboard and loading her into the ambulance for the trip into an Asheville emergency room. The young woman in the purple jacket had gone with Miss Barrett.

“She’s the one who called us,” Sheriff Mackenzie Blaine had explained. “Miss Barrett’s niece or something—been visiting her aunt. She said Miss Barrett started acting kind of squirrelly—obsessing about this house. Evidently the house belongs to Miss Barrett—or she thinks it does. Anyway, the niece—what’s her name, Jan, Janice?—said she went to the store after lunch and when she came back, her aunt was gone.”

As soon as the ambulance had been loaded, Phillip had led Elizabeth to her car, started the motor, and turned the heat to high. In a few moments the car filled with warmth but Elizabeth, her face pale and drawn, continued to shiver. Phillip put an arm around her as Mackenzie Blaine slipped into the back seat. Behind the jeep, his deputy waited in the patrol car. Clouds of white exhaust billowed from both vehicles.

Blaine stared out the car window at the old house. “It’s a sad thing, seeing a woman like Miss Barrett come to this. Folks always thought a lot of her around here—hell, there’s a couple of old boys I know, they think she hung the moon. Funny thing—”

“Mac,” Phillip interrupted, “Why’d the niece call you? How’d she know her aunt wasn’t over at a neighbor’s house or—”

“Oh, there was a note—and it worried the niece enough that she called us right away—well, you saw what happened—Miss Barrett was trying to kill herself.”

Blaine opened the back door and stepped back out into the cold air. “’Fraid she may get her wish—the EMTs weren’t sure if she’d make it.”

He leaned back into the car and cast a sympathetic brown gaze at Elizabeth whose face was wet with tears. “You knew her, you said?”

Elizabeth gulped and nodded. “I met her for the first time a few months ago. But, Mackenzie, Nola Barrett was not
squirrelly
…or suicidal…at least not when I saw her a week ago. My god, the woman has a memory like…like…”

She faltered, unable to find a strong enough comparison. “Well, her memory’s amazing. Just a few weeks ago I was telling her about how Sam and I left suburbia to learn to farm…how we wanted a garden and cows and bees…and all of a sudden she launched into ‘Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee…’”

She broke off, seeing puzzlement spread over the sheriff’s face. “It’s from a poem by William Butler Yeats. Nola knew it all by heart. She told me that she had memorized page after page of poetry and still could go on for hours without repeating herself. She was…she was the most…”

The memory of that nightmare figure on the upper porch, the pathetic crumpled form, and the still, white face that disappeared into the ambulance was too much. Betrayed by a rising tide of tears, Elizabeth turned away, unable to go on.

Blaine’s eyes met Phillip’s and he said gently, “You all go on home. I’ll be in touch.”

When the sheriff’s car had gone, leaving the way clear, Phillip backed slowly and carefully down the rutted drive. Elizabeth stared up at the old house. The blank windows stared back, watching and waiting under the lowering sky.

In spite of the car’s heater and her attempts at control, her body continued to shiver. As they pulled farther away from the house, once again she could see the dolls on the back porch, stirred into a writhing, endless dance by the chilly wind sweeping down the river gorge.