The Scarecrow: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom) Read online

  “I’m making dinner,” she said.

  “I hate casseroles.” Gordon took off his tweed jacket and folded it over his arm.

  “I found the recipe in the cabinet. I thought ...” Katy brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her face was flushed.

  “Where did you get that dress?”

  She looked down and found herself in a dress she’d never seen before. It had an autumnal print and was a little more frilly and feminine than the austere styles Katy preferred. The dress was a little dusty but it fit her body as if it had been tailored. Why was she wearing it to cook?

  “It was in the closet, I think. Must have been something I packed years ago and came across while I was cleaning.”

  “It looks nice. Like something Rebecca would wear.” Gordon went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Merlot. He didn’t stop to kiss her as he passed. He poured himself a glass of wine and sat at the butcher block table that stood in one corner and served as a stand for several houseplants. “You smell nice.”

  “About this morning,” Katy said. She focused on slicing a red onion. Any excuse for tears was welcome.

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “We have to, honey. We’re married.”

  “I lost control. It won’t happen again.”

  Katy slammed down the knife. “I want it to happen again. But I don’t want it to be cold and strange.”

  If only Gordon would stand up and come to her, take her in his arms, nuzzle her neck and make stupid promises, she would have accepted his earlier behavior. She even would have defended it. After all, Katy had her own problems. She wasn’t exactly coming into the marriage as a virgin.

  “Where’s Jett?” Gordon asked.

  “Jett?” Katy looked down at the raw food and spices. Jett was probably in her room studying. She had walked through the front door hours ago. Katy should have checked on her, or at least called up the stairs to make sure her daughter knew she was around. That was Katy’s part of the deal. She would be an involved parent while trusting Jett to stay away from drugs and giving her daughter some breathing room.

  “She’s in her room,” Katy said.

  “I have a job for her.”

  “About the eggs,” Katy said.

  “Forget it. I’ll have Odus handle the farm chores from now on. It wasn’t fair for me to expect you to take on extra work. You have enough to do here in the house.”

  In this house that seemed more like a prison. Katy had to think back to remember the last time she’d left the house. Grocery shopping, three days ago. Most of her time in the house was spent in the kitchen, and she’d never liked cooking before. Now she was making casseroles.

  “How was your day at the college?” It was the kind of thing a normal wife would ask, and she wanted very much to be a normal wife.

  “Long,” he said, then finished his glass of wine. “Try telling that idiot Graybeal that Methodists weren’t the only denomination to use circuit-riding preachers.”

  “Graybeal? He’s the dean, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but you would think he’s lord of the fiefdom to see him swagger around, whipping out his shriveled intellectual dingus.”

  “He’s probably just jealous because of your book.”

  “No, he thinks foot-washing belongs to the realm of human sacrifice and snake handling. Anything that’s not Buddhist or Taoist is all lumped together under ‘God worship.’”

  Katy stared down at the yellow gruel of the casserole. Should she add an extra quarter of a stick of butter? “I thought ‘God worship’ was the point.”

  “Graybeal thinks Christianity is a cult. A popular one, to be sure, but a cult nonetheless.” He was falling into lecture mode. His voice rose slightly in pitch, the words carefully enunciated.

  Katy was pleased that he was spending time with her instead of hiding away in the study, but she wanted to move the subject to something a little closer to home. “What job did you have for Jett?”

  “I want her to feed the goats.”

  “I thought Odus was going to do the farm chores.”

  “I mean tonight. Odus doesn’t have a phone. I’ll probably have to drive over to his place tomorrow, or catch up with him at the general store.”

  Katy wiped her hands on the dish towel that hung from the oven handle. “I’ll go get her.”

  “No, you’re busy.” His upper lip curled a little, as if he had smelled an unpleasant odor.

  “I thought you’d like this,” Katy said. “It’s your family recipe.”

  “I hate onions,” he said. “They give me indigestion.”

  Such was marriage. You didn’t learn the important things until after the knot was already tied. If you tried to be respectful and cautious, you didn’t jump into the sack with the guy you were going to marry until the vows were made. At least not the second time around. You figured there would be kinks and quirks to sort out, but older people were wiser and more experienced. Or maybe just slower to admit mistakes.

  Gordon rinsed his wine glass and left the room. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Be polite,” Katy said. “She’s trying, you know.”

  Gordon didn’t answer. Katy opened the refrigerator and took out a pint of heavy cream. She had never bought cream in her life, although she had picked some up at the grocery store Tuesday. It was almost as if she knew she would need it for the recipe she’d found this afternoon.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jett dropped her book bag on the floor and dove onto her bed. Her heart was racing, as it always did when she was stoned. Pot was a stimulant, and the textbooks classified it somewhere between a narcotic and a hallucinogenic. It didn’t make you hallucinate like acid did, but she’d never known acid to trick you into thinking you’d had a battle of wits with a goat. She swore to herself she would never get stoned again.

  Like father, like daughter.

  She was just kicking off her shoes when she heard the pounding on her door. “Jessica?”

  Great. Gordon. Just the thing to kill a good buzz. “Yeah?”

  The door handle turned. Gordon must have decided to treat her with some respect, though, because he let go of the handle and said, “Can I come in?”

  “Just a sec. Let me get dressed.” She got up, threw a book and some paper on her desk, and slouched into her chair. She hooked headphones around her neck and punched up some Nine Inch Nails, just to piss off Gordon, although she preferred Robyn Hitchcock when she was stoned. No time for the Visine in her desk drawer. She’d just have to bluff her way through.

  “Come on in, it’s unlocked,” she said, deciding not to call him on his turning of the knob before she’d invited him in.

  Gordon walked in like he was a professor and Jett’s bedroom was the classroom. Lecture time. “Why aren’t you helping your mom with supper?”

  “I have homework.” She nodded at the book on her desk.

  “Oh.” He looked around, as if he’d never seen the room before. His eyes stopped on the movie poster of a gaunt and pale Johnny Depp from “Edward Scissorhands,” and he frowned. “We haven’t had time to get to know each other, Jett. It’s important for me that we get along. Important for both of us, I think. It will make things easier on your mother.”

  “Mom’s been kind of weird lately.”

  “She’s trying hard to make this work. Wasn’t it fun when we were taking those photos the other day? That’s what families do.” Gordon acted like he wanted to sit down, but her bed was the only suitable surface in the room besides the floor, and Jett couldn’t picture him sitting on either of those surfaces. He fingered the knot of his tie. “I think we ought to have a father-to-daughter talk.”

  She opened her mouth but he held up his hand to cut her off. “I meant that as a figure of speech. I don’t want to replace your real father. But we do live under the same roof and we need to lay out some ground rules.”

  “Besides the ‘no drugs’ thing.”

  “That’s for everybody’s pe
ace of mind, especially yours. We have high aspirations for you, Jessica. I never thought I’d have somebody to carry on the Smith tradition.”

  “But I’m not a Smith.” She wondered if Gordon was stoned on something himself, because he was making less sense than Jett was. From the way he hovered over her, she could see straight up his nose to the black, wiry hairs inside. A little fleck of dried booger clung to one of them. She tried not to giggle.

  “We’re still a family. I know things have been a little rough on you, having to make new friends and acclimate yourself to this old farmhouse. It’s a major transition from Charlotte to Solom.”

  “Yeah, they don’t have no goats grazing along Independence Boulevard.”

  Gordon’s lips quavered as if he were trying to smile and failing. “That’s ‘any’ goats.”

  “Any goats. Like, what’s their deal?”

  “Deal?”

  “Your goats act like they own the place. I know they’re supposed to be stubborn, but they’re kind of creepy.”

  “They’re more pets than anything. They won’t hurt you.”

  Maybe they won’t hurt YOU. But you’re part of this place. They probably think I’m some kind of alien freak, come in from the outside world to threaten their way of life.

  As soon as the thought arose, Jett dismissed it as silly. The goats were weird, that was for sure, but they were just shaggy, cloven-hoofed, goofy-eyed animals when you got right down to it. Nothing to be afraid of. Even if they ate your dope and looked at you like you were a germ under a microscope.

  “Your eyes are bloodshot,” Gordon said, sniffing the air. The little booger quivered as if preparing to drop free, and she watched it with fascination.

  “Yeah. I’m not sleeping very well.”

  “I thought you’d be settled in by now.”

  “Bad dreams. There’s this man in a black hat who—”

  Gordon took an abrupt step backward and accidentally kicked her backpack with his heel. The zippered section was open, revealing the dull glint of her pot baggie. She expected Gordon to give it a once-over, but he regained his balance and said in a near whisper, “A man in a black hat?”

  “Yeah, and an old-timey suit that’s all black and worn out, like it had been picked over. I can’t really see his face, it’s like the brim of the hat throws a shadow over it.” Jett didn’t mention that she’d seen him in the boiler room at school. If the man was real, then Gordon might know something about him. But if Jett’s acid trip had eaten a permanent hole in her brain, she didn’t want to arouse any suspicions or she might end up in lockdown at a psychiatric ward. Not that a vacation would be all bad, but Mom was already a basket case and that might send her over the edge. And good old Dad would probably drop his job and his new girlfriend and make a beeline to Solom to straighten things out, screwing everything up in his usual bumbling way.

  “I won’t lecture you on the chemical changes caused by substance abuse,” Gordon said. “Drugs can do permanent damage. Hallucinations, confusion, memory loss.”

  Jett nodded absently, focusing on the brittle grind of Trent Reznor’s voice leaking from the headphones. And don’t forget that good old side effect of FUN. So quit lecturing already and go wipe your damned nose.

  “Okay, Gordon. I promised you and Mom I’d stay clean. No sweat.”

  Gordon reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, as if he’d been studying parental techniques in a textbook. “Hang in there, Jessica. We’ll make this family work.”

  “I know. But I’d better get back to this homework.”

  “The satisfaction of academic achievement is the best drug of all.”

  Whatever.

  He paused at the door. “You’re going to love Solom.”

  After he left the room, Jett locked the door and popped the Nine Inch Nails out of the Walkman. Hitchcock’s “Element of Light” was the ticket now. She retrieved the baggie from her backpack, sprinkled a pinch of grass in her aluminum-foil pipe, and carried it with the lighter to her window. She eased the window up and the evening chill sliced its way into the room. If she took small puffs and exhaled through the gap, then even Gordon’s big hairy nose couldn’t detect the scent.

  Beyond the glass, the world was dark and still. Even the insects were tucked away, as if hungry predators roamed the night. The stars were scattered like grains of salt on a blue blanket, the quarter moon sharp as a scythe. The mountains made sweeping black waves along the horizon. She had to give it to Solom on that count: it had Charlotte beat all to hell on scenery.

  She was about to thumb her lighter when she saw movement out in the corn field. The tops of the dead stalks stirred. She expected a wayward goat to walk out from the rows. The animals were renowned for breaking through their fences. The buttheads never seemed to get enough to eat. They probably chewed in their sleep.

  But it wasn’t a goat. It was a man. In the scant moonlight, she could just make out the brim of his hat. The brim lifted in her direction, as if the man were staring up at the window.

  She looked down at the dried leaves in the curled bowl of the pipe. “Hallucination, my ass,” she said.

  Jett sparked the lighter and held the flame just over the dope. She planned on losing her mind, at least for a little while. Because if her mind was gone, then she wouldn’t have to remember. And if she didn’t remember, then the Scarecrow Man didn’t exist.

  Drug problem.

  Oxymoron.

  Drug problem equals no problem.

  She closed her eyes. In the sixth grade, the class had been herded into the mandatory “Healthful Living” class, largely drilling abstinence into their heads while pointing out the dangers of touching each other’s clinical bits. But a couple of sessions had been spent on the dangers of drugs, including a “Scared Straight” video in which prisoners and homeless people—or at least earnest and convincing actors playing those roles—talked about the horrors they had endured through addiction. Jett didn’t need secondhand testimony. She’d had a daily exhibition, as her dad went down the toilet, bottomed out, and got busted. Mom had walked the gangplank a hundred times before finally jumping ship.

  Will catching a buzz really make things better?

  She peeked out the window, and the Scarecrow Man was still there, watching. She swallowed and put away the pipe.

  Scared straight? Scared shitless is more like it.

  Jett checked the window latch, dropped the shade, and climbed into bed. She kept the light on, which didn’t help her sleep. Neither did the blanket pulled over her head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Katy asked Gordon.

  “What?”

  “The thing you don’t want to talk about.”

  Katy turned her back to him and shimmied out of the dress with the autumnal print. She hung it in the closet, though she’d spilled some butter sauce on it during dinner. She felt oddly exposed in front of her husband, although she was in her bra and panties and he’d certainly viewed the marital merchandise on at least one occasion.

  Gordon was in his pajamas, in bed, pretending to read a Dostoevsky novel. He had changed in the bathroom, locking the door so she couldn’t enter while he was taking a shower and brushing his teeth.

  “You mean Jessica?”

  That wasn’t what she meant, and she approached the dresser for the sole purpose of glancing in the mirror to see if he were looking at her body. His gaze never left the book. “What about her?” she asked.

  “I know a counselor. He teaches part-time at Westridge, and I’m sure he’ll give me a discount if insurance doesn’t cover it.”

  She removed her earrings, a set of sterling silver crescent moons, and put them in the cedar jewelry box on the dresser. Only after she closed the lid did she realize she’d never seen either the earrings or the box before. “What?” she said, too loudly for bedtime.

  “For her problems. The drugs, the wild stories, the way she dresses to intentionally offend. She’s making a classic
ploy for attention.”

  Like mother, like daughter.

  Katy removed her bra and let it slip to the floor, still looking into the mirror. Her freckled breasts were high and firm, even though she had breast-fed Jett. Katy picked up the silver-handled brush on the dresser and began running it through her red hair, flipping her head so the sheen would reflect in the bedside lamplight. Gordon was engrossed in the Dostoevsky.

  “Do you think I’m prettier than Rebecca?” she asked.

  Gordon closed the novel with a slap of pulp. “That’s a hell of a thing to ask a man. It’s like asking if I think you’re fat.”

  “I’ve seen her picture. She’s not like me at all. Brown hair, dark eyes, fuller lips. They say some men have a ‘type’ and go for it time after time, even when it’s bad for them.”

  “We were talking about Jessica.”

  She turned to face him, her nipples hard in the cool September air. “You keep changing the subject.”

  “The subject is us. All of us.” His eyes stayed fixed on hers, resisting any temptation he might have had to let his gaze crawl over her figure. Perhaps he had no desire and nothing to hide. Maybe this morning’s sex had been his version of a personality warp. Jett might not be the only one in the house who had hallucinations. But Katy was dressing in clothes she didn’t recognize, so she wasn’t in much position to judge.

  Were they all going insane? What if Jett was spiking their food, slipping LSD or some other brain-scrambling substance into the recipes she’d found scattered about the kitchen? No. Jett was off drugs. She had promised.

  “We’re trying, Gordon,” she said. “You knew we came with strings attached.”

  “You look cold. Why don’t you put on a robe?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Maybe you should save your worry for what’s happening between us. We screwed each other’s brains out this morning, and it was the first time you ever touched me in any way that mattered. I thought I’d finally broken through. Now you act like nothing happened.”