Chapter Twenty-Four – Faith

 

“Now do you believe me that it’s a freaking cult doing this?” I asked as we climbed back into Sam’s car, our stomachs full from a surprisingly good lunch.

“Oh, come on,” he replied, laughing what sounded like a forced laugh. “That in there? Just a bunch of weird guys checking out the new folks in town. That’s all.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes as I buckled my seat belt. “Dammit, Sam.”

“So, while we’re here, we’re going to go by and check out the meatpacking facility.”

“Wait,” I said, pushing my shoulders back and lifting my chin as I turned to him. “Why are we going there?”

“Well, it seems interesting. I figure while we’re out this way, we should just pop in and take a look around. I’ve never been to a meatpacking facility. Have you?”

“No, but I’ve never been to a public execution or a Klan rally. Doesn’t mean I want to go to either on a daytrip. If those guys aren’t part of a cult, and they’re not responsible for butchering Eb Shook’s pig, why are we even going up there? Shouldn’t we just head back to town instead, and start looking at those archives?”

“Well,” he replied, dragging out the word as he buckled up and pulled his phone out of his pocket, “if we don’t go out there, how else can I prove to you it’s not a cult?”

“Really? That’s the best you’ve got.”

“Besides,” he continued as he brought up his maps and began to type something out on the screen of his phone, “maybe it wasn’t a wild animal. Maybe it was just some crazy guy, like the one that Eb talked about that he saw however many decades ago?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding along. “Okay. Maybe.”

“And where else would a guy learn to do that kind of thing, other than a meatpacking facility?”

I sighed and shifted around in my seat. I didn’t particularly like that line of reasoning, but there wasn’t anything immediately wrong with it. Not enough so that I could just dismiss it out of hand. I don’t know. Maybe Sam was telling me the truth? Maybe he was just a plain old newspaper reporter, out to figure out the perfectly normal causes of these mutilations.

“Okay. Maybe. A big—really, really freaking big—maybe. But, what about the morgue break-in?”

“Come on, Faith, those guys ate in unison. You think whoever butchered Eb Shook’s pig couldn’t get his buddy to go with him and help steal the remains? Besides, for someone to butcher that hog the way you described, there would have to be more than one of them.”

I frowned, turning away from him as he stared down into the glaringly white screen of his phone. Whatever he was trying to pull up wasn’t being cooperative.

“So, let’s just go down there and look it over,” he continued. “I’ll go in and pretend I’m doing an article on regional businesses or something, see if we can’t get a tour.”

“What then? What will that prove?”

“Well, it’ll prove there’s nothing weird going on there. At least we’ll be able to cross it off the list, right? Hey, do you have any service? I can’t get my maps to pull up.”

“Hold on,” I said, reaching down into my little purse in the passenger side footwell. I pulled my phone out and checked the bars. “Sorry,” I said. “I got nothing.”

Best part of living in the country? The solitude.

Worst part? No cell service.

Sam grumbled, stuffed his phone away.

“Waitress said it was just down 69, right? Isn’t that what we came into town on?”

“Yeah,” he said, still a note of irritation to his voice. “But, I wanted to call my editor also. Have her start looking into a few things. Should’ve called her before we even left the Shook place, but I just now remembered.”

“Can’t be that pressing then, can it?” I asked. “Just call her when we get back into town.”

He pulled out his keys, got the engine going. “Nah, you’re right. It can wait for a little while. Besides, maybe we’ll have service out at the facility.”

I sighed and shifted around in my seat. The meatpacking facility was as sound a place as any to start our search, I guessed.

But, as he put the Camaro into reverse, a vision of the old house near Shook’s property flashed to mind. In a weird way, it almost made more sense than the meatpacking place.

“Okay, I see your point about the facility,” I said slowly, carefully. “But what about the old house I told you about? Why not check there first?”

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense, either.”

“Of course it does. If it’s an old abandoned building, there could be all sorts of things in there. Wild animals, transients. If you were hunting down livestock for their skin, what kind of person would you be? The kind who works a nine-to-five? Or the kind who hides out in old houses falling down somewhere in the middle of nowhere?”

We sat there for a long moment as he considered my words, the car still in reverse, the engine rumbling the whole frame and sending the vibrations up into my body like the earth itself was trying to shake me loose in the most soothing way imaginable.

Brow furrowed, he clenched his jaw and looked away, seeming to nod a little to the outside as his weirdly tattooed hand tightly gripped the gearshift.

“Tell you what,” he said, turning back to me. “How about we flip on it?”

“Flip on it?” I asked with a laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I’m serious,” he said. “Look, you’re right. Your idea is just as good as mine. So, we’ll just let Fate, or Lady Luck or whoever, decide for us. Simple.”

What he suggested had a certain kind of logic. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. If all we had were hunches based on no real hard evidence, or most importantly facts, then what right did either of us have to dismiss the other? Or decide this based on merit? We were grasping at straws here, so why not just randomly pick the next pile of hay we were about to jump into?

“All right,” I said, nodding along as I shifted excitedly in my seat. “Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s flip for it.”

He dug into his jeans pocket and eventually produced a quarter, after a moment or two of earnest fishing. He held it up for me to inspect, the silvery face of George Washington pinched so tightly between his thumb and fingers that boogers might come out of his nose at any moment.

“No tricks,” he said, gesturing with the coin for emphasis. “Just a plain old coin.”

I nodded, almost enthusiastically when you considered that my suggestion was to go visit a rundown, one-hundred-fifty-year-old condemned mansion that might or might not be hiding a man capable both mentally and physically of skinning the skin off a pig.

“Got it,” I said with a grin.

What had gotten into me? Was I just getting wrapped up in the moment? Or was it just my proximity to Sam?

Maybe it was that I could feel the truth out there just beyond my reach, like the perfect word for the world’s most perfect poem just sitting there on the tip of your tongue.

He locked eyes with me as he adjusted the coin so it sat precisely on the tip of his thumbnail. “Call it in the air.” Sam flipped it lightly into the air, a deceptively heavy, perfect spin on it as the motion seemed to transform it visually into a perfect sphere that sailed through the interior of the car.

“Tails!” I said, my hands tightly clenched together and shaking as I continued to grin, my eyes following the short up-and-down trajectory of the quarter as it rose from his thumb and into the air.

The spinning quarter fell gracefully into the palm of his hand, which snapped tight faster than a bear trap around the little piece of faux silver.

“What is it?” I asked, his hand still closed.

He unfolded his hand carefully, and we both looked inside.

“Creepy manor house it is,” he breathed. “Should’ve known Fate was going to side with another woman.”

I grinned. “Guess you’ll have to wait on your butchering lessons,” I said, maybe a little too smugly.

He shifted around in his seat so he could see out the back, gripping the steering wheel as he prepared to pull out onto Garrison’s vacant Main Street. “You win this round.”

I laughed a little as I straightened myself out and faced forward.

“Sam?” I asked, my breath almost catching in my throat. “Don’t look now.”

“What?” he asked as he pulled out, and went to put it in first. And then, he did look. “Holy…”

There, standing arrayed across the entrance to the cafe, was everyone that had been in the small restaurant with us. They stared out at us with laser-like focus, their piercing gazes following our every movement. They didn’t make any motion otherwise, just seemed to stand and watch. And judge.

I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

During lunch, the workers’ display of eating in tandem had been bizarre, creepy, weird. Now, with all of them arrayed abreast in front of us, even the cook with his stained purple apron and the front of his pants covered in flour as they fluttered in the cool fall breeze, I was beginning to think if maybe I had been wrong. Maybe we should go to the meatpacking facility first.

More importantly, though, maybe I was actually right? Maybe it was a cult.

“I think I screwed up,” I breathed, referring to more than just my insistence on going to the manor.

No, no I didn’t. I mentally shook my head at myself. Everyone around me in town was trying to ignore what had happened out at Eb Shook’s farm. Even my boss. The cops, everyone. The only people who seemed to care were two leathery farmers, whom the animals had belonged to, and I and the man in the driver’s seat next to me.

If we didn’t figure this out, and somehow put a spotlight on what was causing this, who else would? And before it somehow became worse, and pulled more animals of innocent ranchers into it? Or, God forbid, even people?

“Well, I don’t care if the spooky brigade is out on parade,” Sam said after a long moment of the car just sitting there, rumbling with pent-up energy like it was purring for us to just go already. “Fate has spoken. We’ll just go to the meatpacking facility tomorrow.”