Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) (13 page)

Stella shielded her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“Naw.”

“Then … why are you talking to me?”

“Just being neighborly. Pretty thing like you should be used to that. I bet men been neighborly to you your whole life.”

She walked up onto the porch in order to see him more clearly. He wasn’t the first dirty old man she’d encountered; since puberty, she’d dealt with the unwanted attention of older males. When she rejected or ignored them, they often turned hostile, and she knew how to handle that as well. And today she was particularly in the mood to deal harshly with anything masculine that crossed her path.

“Look, I’d appreciate it if you’d mind your own business. What if I were your granddaughter and some old man started coming on to her? How would you feel?”

“Well, if she was as pretty as you, I’d at least understand it. Men have to be men.”

She scowled. That sounded enough like a threat that it made her a bit nervous. “I’m married, too, you know.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t happy about it.”

She folded her arms. “Now, why would you say that?”

“I seen your husband drive off with somebody else in his truck earlier.”

She blinked a little. They knew no one in this town; Terry had found it on a map and made reservations on the Internet. He hadn’t mentioned anyone accompanying him when he’d rushed through the room, grabbing papers. “Who?” she asked coolly.

“Had dark hair, that’s all I could see. Lots of people around here do.”

Stella was taken aback. Could Terry really be having an
affair
? Could he have met some local woman on the Internet, come here to tryst with her under the pretense of this genealogy research, and then picked these fights in order to have time alone with this new paramour? Was he that devious, that resourceful?

“I don’t believe you,” she said at last.

“Suit yourself,” Rockhouse said with a shrug. “But a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be alone.”

“I think I can manage.” She turned to walk away, then froze. Standing ten feet behind her was the most handsome—no, the most
beautiful
—man she’d ever seen. Her stomach dropped, her mouth went dry, and her whole body seemed to surge with sensation. When he smiled, she thought she’d pass out.

“Hey, there, little lady,” he said, and his voice made her whole body shudder. “My name’s Stoney. What’s yours?”

12

“So where is it?” Kizer asked.

Rob scanned the field behind the deserted fire station. Everything was just as he remembered it, but he saw no sign of the tombstones poking above the waving grass. “It was right there,” he said in disbelief. “I swear.”

“Maybe we’re not in the right spot to see it,” Kizer said helpfully.

“I was standing right here yesterday and saw it,” Rob grumbled. “Right
here,
” he repeated with certainty.

“Hm. Well, It didn’t show it on any of my maps, so maybe you made a mistake.”

“Look, I walked up to them and touched them. I read the inscriptions off them. I took pictures with my phone. I’m telling you, they’re here somewhere.”

He marched out into the grass, toward the spot he
knew
the graveyard had occupied the day before. Kizer followed, a little wary now. “It really isn’t that big a deal,” he called, but Rob ignored him.

“Goddammit,” Rob muttered as he stomped through the weeds, “it was here, I swear to God.” Yet now he saw no sign of the fence, the tall tombstones, or even a cleared space where they might have been.

His foot slipped into a small hole.
“Shit!”
he cried as he fell; his head hit the ground right on the place Bliss had stitched. Pain shot through him like he’d been stabbed in the skull. “
Ow!
Oh,
goddammit
!” He curled on his side and cradled his head.

“You okay?” Kizer asked as he rushed to him.

Almost immediately, the pain faded to a dull ache. “Yeah, just hit the same goddam spot again.” When he gingerly touched it, he felt fresh blood. “Oh, great. Can you see if I ripped the stitches?”

Kizer scrutinized his scalp. “No, they’re still there. Just busted the scab. It’s not bleeding much.”

Rob blinked into the sun, which seemed brighter now, harder on his eyes. With Kizer’s help, he got to his feet and brushed the dirt off his jeans. He turned to say something, then froze.

Behind Kizer, no more than thirty feet away, he saw the tops of the headstones above the grass. “I’ll be damned. It’s right there.”

“Where?” Kizer said, and turned around. He couldn’t speak for a moment. “But … I mean, we just…”

“I know, but there it is.”

Kizer took several pictures of the cemetery’s perimeter. Then he tried the gate, which didn’t budge. “Is it locked?”

“Just a little rusty,” Rob said. “Try it like you mean it.”

Kizer leaned against it, and the gate protested as it swung open and allowed him to squeeze inside.

Rob remained outside the fence, looking out at the waving grass. Under the crisp blue sky, it was postcard-beautiful, and although he had to squint into the sunlight, he felt a weird tingle inside. It was almost like he was looking at something alive, as if the rolling peaks with their wispy clouds were the curves of great, soft women reclined beside each other as far as he could see.

A gust of wind, cold like the one that came through his window at night, blew over him.
Curnen shares your song,
a voice seemed to say in his head.
Curnen hears your heart.

He blinked. Where had
that
come from? “Did you hear something?”

“No,” Kizer said absently.

“Huh.” He looked around, but saw no one else.

“I can’t read any of these,” Kizer complained, breaking the reverie.

“What?”

“The inscriptions. They’re too worn down to read. Which ones did you see ‘Swett’ on?”

Rob went inside the fence and looked at the monuments. The surfaces were weathered and flat, including the ones on which he’d read the poems the previous day. “What the—?” he muttered, and knelt before one. He pressed his fingers to the now-smooth surface. “Okay, maybe I got hit in the head harder than I thought, but I swear to God, there was a readable inscription here.”

“It’s not there now,” Kizer said.

Rob couldn’t believe it. Plainly, the stone had not been recently altered. The barest hints of the words could be seen, but not nearly well enough to be legible. So how had he read them yesterday?

“I can feel something here,” Rob said. “I just can’t make it out.”

“All right, let me at it,” Kizer said. He pulled some paper and a charcoal stick from his backpack and pressed it against the stone. Working quickly, he covered the paper with broad, wide swaths of gray, against which the monument’s engraving plainly stood out. “Well, what do you know?” He moved the paper and looked behind it. “That sure did come out plain for something that’s so messed up, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. Is that who you’re looking for?”

“One of them, yeah. Thomas Swett. They called him ‘Bullman Tom’ because he once beat a bull in a tug-of-war. He’s on my mother’s side at some point, I’ll have to check when I get back to the hotel. Now I just need the rubbings off the others to get names and dates for more research.” He looked up at Rob. “Thanks, man. I know it seems kind of loony, but this means a lot. I might never have found this place without your help.”

“Glad to do it.”

As Kizer went to work, Rob stared at the other Swett tombstone that only yesterday had borne a plain, legible inscription. Now it, too, was unreadable.

“That’s some weird shit, these epitaphs,” Kizer said.

“Yeah,” Rob agreed. “Have you run up on anything like this before?”

“No. Seems odd that somebody would take the time to chisel so many words into a rock, doesn’t it? Most people just had the name and dates, maybe a short Bible verse.”

“Maybe the Swetts were big shots around here.”

“Hardly.” He carefully rolled the rubbings and placed them in a tube that hung from his bag. “We’d call them white trash if they were around today, I’m afraid.”

Rob nodded absently, his attention drawn back to the wave pattern of wind across the grass. When the breeze reached him, he felt the odd tingle again, but did not hear the strange voice.

*   *   *

Kizer dropped Rob off at the Catamount Corner. Without going inside, Rob got his car and drove out to Doyle’s gas station. Doyle’s father sat on a pillow atop two milk crates, his back against the building, reading a magazine. He looked up as Rob got out of his car.

“Howdy,” he said. “Car still starting okay?”

“Yeah, so far,” Rob said. “Is Doyle around?”

“In the garage,” he said, pronouncing it “ghee-raj.”

Rob found Doyle under the hood of a spotless black Gran Torino. The owner clearly treasured it. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Doyle said with a smile. “How’s it going?”

“A little weird,” he said honestly. “After I left your place last night, somebody snuck into my room while I was asleep, and…” He trailed off, suddenly aware of how ludicrous he sounded. “Ah, forget it, the more I think about it, the more I figure I must’ve just been dreaming. Mainly I just wanted to see if you knew how to reach Bliss Overbay.”

“Somebody snuck in your room?” Doyle said. “Like a burglar?”

“I don’t think so. I think it was somebody’s kid: I found little muddy footprints all over the place. The creepy part is, I was in there asleep when it happened. And they would’ve had to have come in through a second-story window.” He didn’t mention that the handprints seemed to show six fingers; the story was already strange enough.

“That
is
creepy,” Doyle agreed.

“So do you know how to get in touch with Bliss?”

He wiped his hands on a rag. “I might have her number around here somewhere. Mind if I ask why?”

“I don’t know. Mind if I ask why you want to ask why?”

“The folks around here—the hard-core pure-blood Tufas—have their own way of doing things. And they’re like a tribe, with important people at the top. Bliss is one of those important people.”

“Important how?”

“It’s complicated, and there’s a lot I don’t know. But I’ve heard people say that among the Tufa women, she’s the second-highest authority. There’s not much business in Needsville, so I can’t afford to alienate anybody by being indiscreet. Especially someone with any sort of influence.”

“I want her to take a look at the stitches she put in. I fell down this morning, and I might’ve torn ’em loose.” Since that wasn’t technically a lie, Rob had no problem meeting Doyle’s eyes when he said it. But he mainly wanted to talk to her about what had happened at the graveyard.

The mechanic thought hard. “Well … okay.” Rob followed him into the office, where Doyle wrote the number on a Post-it note. “Better tell her you got it from me, though.”

“Why? If I don’t, will she wave her hands at me?” He wiggled his fingers, intending to be funny.

Doyle turned red, although his voice stayed even. Rob couldn’t tell if he was angry or embarrassed. “No, but she might not talk to you if she thinks you got her number some underhanded way, like off the Internet or something.”

“Sorry, it was a bad joke. But seriously, what is all that hand-waving stuff? Is it religious or something?”

“When you were a kid, did you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s kind of like that. We were all raised being told that some silly stuff was true. And even though we’re all grown up and know better, it’s settled in our heads so well that we still act like it’s true sometimes.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

He shrugged. “Best I can do.” He went back into the garage, picked up a socket handle, and stuck his head back under the Torino’s hood.

“Well, thanks for the number,” Rob called after him, worried that he’d alienated his only real friend here.

As Rob drove away, he swore he saw Doyle on the phone in the office, talking earnestly with someone. It was a momentary glimpse, really no more than an impression, and he knew that thinking Doyle was calling to warn Bliss had to be a reflection of his own paranoia. Didn’t it?

13

When Rob returned to the Catamount Corner, a Tennessee State Trooper’s car was parked next to Terry Kizer’s SUV. As he got out, the young officer appeared from inside and came down the steps toward him. He had the Tufa hair and skin. “Are you Mr. Robert Quillen?” he asked in that flat, emotionless policeman’s way.

Rob’s first thought was that he was being arrested and would be forced back on the TV show. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I’m Trooper Alvin Darwin. I need to talk to you in an official capacity, Mr. Quillen. Might have a missing-persons case on our hands, and you might be a witness.”

“Who’s missing?” Rob asked.

Before Darwin could answer, Terry Kizer came out the front door. “Hey, Rob. You didn’t see Stella while you were out, did you?”

“No.” Rob looked at Darwin. “Is that who’s missing?”

Again, as Darwin started to speak, Kizer jumped in. “She wasn’t in our room when we got back, and she didn’t leave a note or anything. But we found her purse down the street.” He indicated the area around the post office, where Rockhouse sat alone on the porch. The shadow was too deep for Rob to tell if the old man watched them.

“You ask that old guy?” Rob said.

“Mr. Hicks said he hadn’t seen her,” Darwin said. “Said he’d been there all morning.”

“Yeah, his word and a dollar’ll get you a cup of coffee,” Rob said.

“And you haven’t seen her since breakfast?” Darwin asked.

“Nope.”

“And Mr. Kizer was with you immediately after breakfast?”

“For a while. We went gravestone-rubbing. Was she carrying any money?”

Kizer nodded. “Yeah, and it was all there when we found it: traveler’s checks, credit cards, everything. I’m starting to get really worried.”

To Darwin, Rob said, “I’m impressed. I thought you had to wait twenty-four hours to declare someone missing.”

“I need to ask you some more questions,” Darwin said, ignoring Rob’s comment. He gave Kizer a serious
be quiet
look, then turned back to Rob. “You never know which details turn out to be important. Can we step inside?”