Ghost Road Blues

Long and dark blew the night wind around and past and through the Bone Man.



His eyes glistened with anger and fear and frustration. The tide of the night was already strong, moving the flotsam around faster than he could keep up. The gray man felt a hopeless surge of sickness in his empty stomach as he sensed the thing in the swamp, the evil presence that he had slaughtered with his own hands and buried thirty years ago, stir and flex its power.



Such power…



The Bone Man stood for a long time in indecision. The calls of the night birds told him much that he needed to know, told him too much. Now he didn’t know which way to turn. Whose life mattered more? Which of the innocent ones needed him more than the others? Which innocents ones would he have to sacrifice to save the rest?



Thunder sniggered in the east.



The Bone Man turned north and began walking toward Pine Deep, his stick legs swishing, his stick arms swinging, and his white face gleaming like polished marble. In his eyes, cold storms raged.



3



“I thought you were making supper for Crow.”



Val didn’t look up from her crossword puzzle. Her father lifted the lid and stuck his whole face into the aromatic vapors and took a deep breath. “Smells pretty good.”



“Don’t sound so surprised. I can cook, you know.”



Guthrie didn’t choose to reply to that; instead he sniffed the soup again, amazed that it really smelled like soup and not sewage. Val’s previous attempts at cooking were spectacular disasters. Maybe she’d had a culinary epiphany. He found his mouth watering despite all of the warning klaxons ringing in his head.



“Leave it be,” Val said. “You had your dinner.”



“What is it?”



“Turkey soup and get your nose out of it, thank you very much.”



Henry Guthrie sighed and set the lid back on the pot. “There seems to be an awful lot of it for one skinny little fella like Crow.”



“I made enough for his lunch tomorrow.” Val finished a clue and then looked up. Her father was still loitering by the pot, trying to look earnest and hungry. She shook her head but she was smiling. “Pop, if you’re really that hungry, just take some. You go wandering all around a thing hoping it’ll jump at you.”



“Well,” Guthrie said with a smile, his curiosity getting the better of him, “maybe just a little. I wouldn’t want to steal food out of Crow’s mouth, you understand.”



“Uh-​huh.”



He fetched a dish and a ladle and scooped a brimming bowlful, an amount that scarcely dipped the level in the heavy spotted black pot.



“There’s crackers in the cupboard.”



“No dumplings?”



“Pop…”



“Crackers it is, then.” Guthrie took down a box of saltines, rummaged in the fridge for a bottle of spring water, and sat down at the table across from his daughter. A discerning eye could see the kinship between them. She had his strong bones and dark hair, but her coloring and her laughing mouth were from her mother’s Irish stock, not her father’s brooding Scottish blood. The elder Guthrie had heavier features and his once jet-​black hair had gone silver since Val’s mother had died two years before. His nose was hawked and beaky and he had a thick mustache that dipped into his spoonful of soup as he blew on it and sipped.



“How is it then?”



“Just like your mama’s.”



Val smiled. “Her recipe.”



Guthrie’s eyes crinkled into a warm grin that softened his dour face into an expression of great love and humor. Val loved him and he knew it, even if she sometimes nagged at him to eat right and take better care of himself. He had slipped a little after Margie had passed, but Val had hounded him until he had begun to take regular meals and even cut down on his drinking. Now she was trying to get him to switch to decaf, but she was going to have a damned hard fight of that. Unleaded coffee was obscene.



He ate the soup, which was thick with fresh turkey, corn, celery, potatoes, and green beans. He didn’t dare put salt in it: Val would never let him do it without a familiar and long-​winded lecture on high blood pressure. Besides, the soup was good enough not to need it.



Val sat and watched her father eat, enjoying it. Playing the domestic role was new and somewhat out of character for her, but she did it now for her father with no regrets. Left to his own devices, her father would live on pizza and Glenlivet, black coffee and Big Macs. She couldn’t bear the sound of his arteries squeaking shut. Still, she was no kitchen girl, not like her sister-​in-​law, Connie, who seemed blissfully happy to cook, clean, and beam vapidly at her husband, Mark, Val’s only brother. Val worked on the farm, out in the field, driving the tractor, harvesting the corn, bartering with wholesalers, doing valve jobs on the Bronco. Connie had her little herb garden and made adorable little needlepoints with poignant scenes of kittens with balls of yarn that made Val want to vomit. Connie always wore a dress, even when weeding her prim little garden. Crow often whispered to Val that Connie was a Desperate Housewife waiting to pop, and that she had some deep dark secret; but after knowing her for years, Val still couldn’t see any trace of depth in her sister-​in-​law, just as she was totally unable to see what Mark saw in her beyond a purely superficial prettiness.



Watching her father eat his soup, Val felt a little wave of acceptable domesticity waft over her. Lately she’d been trying out that domestic angle on Crow, and she found she liked that, too. Of course, she planned to teach him how to cook because hausfrau was definitely not how she viewed herself. A dash of domesticity here and there was fine.



Guthrie dabbed a cracker in his soup and watched his daughter watching him. “Something on your mind, pumpkin?”



Val shrugged. “Not really.”



“Meaning there is.” Guthrie stifled a grin. “Not really” meant the same thing to Val as it had to her mother.



“Oh, it’s nothing…”



“Something with Crow? So…you guys have a fight? He seemed pretty chipper when he bounced out of here this morning. Whistling and grinning, and I won’t ask why.”



“Oh no, nothing like that. I’m just concerned about him, that’s all.”



He lowered his spoon. “In what way?



She drummed her fingers on top of the crossword puzzle for a moment, looking down, then glanced up at her father. “He’s doing something that might be very dangerous.”



“Oh? He’s not…?” Guthrie made a gesture as if he were knocking back a shot.



“Dad!”



“Just asking.”



“Crow doesn’t drink anymore.”



“Hey, don’t get me wrong—I care a lot for Crow, but alcoholism isn’t something you just grow out of.”



“Well, it’s not that,” she said with just a touch of frost. “It’s something he’s doing for Terry.” She explained what was happening and about Crow’s mission to shut down the hayride.



Guthrie ate a cracker, dry, munching thoughtfully. “Are you afraid he’s going to go back on the cops? Is that it?”



“Oh no…no, he would never do that.”



“Well then, don’t let it worry you. Terry has always had an annoying way of putting people on the spot, getting them to do things they don’t really want to do.”



“I know.”



“He and Crow have always been pretty tight, and you know how persuasive our dear mayor can be.”



“Mm.” Terry and Crow had been best friends since preschool, which meant that they’d known each other even longer than Val had known Crow. The boys had met Val in second grade, when they were all eight, and by the time of the Black Harvest two years later they were thick as thieves. Five of them—Val, Crow and his older brother, Billy, and Terry and his little sister, Mandy. By the end of that autumn two of them were dead—Billy and Mandy—victims of the Reaper, Terry was in a coma, and Crow and Val were clinging to each other, their worlds shattered.



The memory of that time flickered in Val’s eyes, and Guthrie could see it. He smoothly but quickly changed the subject. “Besides, you know Terry,” he said. “He likes to make everything seem dramatic. I think he imagines that being the mayor of a town this size actually means something.”



“Yeah, him and Rudy Giuliani.”



“Like that. He builds things up to be something they ain’t. Hell, he’s the kind that calls going over to Crestville for pizza and a movie a Regional Fine Dining and Cultural Arts Junket.”



Val smiled. “Yeah, I guess.”



“If there really is something going on around here, Terry’s not going to be doing much about it. You said that Crow told you there were some Philly cops coming in?”



“Uh-​huh.”



“So Terry is going to be standing around looking important but not actually doing anything, and he’ll have Gus Bernhardt hustling around getting them coffee and asking to polish their badges. Terry’s one of those guys who needs to be in charge in some visible way, and he loves to give orders—and Crow happened to be there, and your boy can’t hardly say no to anybody.”



“Except me.”



Guthrie gave a comical snort. “Not so’s I noticed. He’ll be by here, you watch.”



“I shouldn’t have let him go at all.”



“Not yours to say, pumpkin. No more than it’s his to speak for you. This is the twenty-​first century, my lass.” Guthrie took another mouthful of soup, winking at her as he did so. “Soup’s really good.”



“Don’t say it like you’re shocked.” Val crossed her arms. “Well, I just wish he wouldn’t jump whenever Terry says to.”



“You think it’s really that bad?”



She shook her head. “It’s just that he spends so much time with Terry, and Terry is such a pain in the ass.”



“You think he should stop hanging around with our fair mayor?”



“Mm.”