McFall Read online

  McFall banged on the door. “Sweeney, come on out.”

  Bobby listened for movement. All he heard was the ticking of the truck’s engine and the distant caw of a crow. “Do you know this guy?” Bobby whispered to Ronnie.

  “Just some loony. He was a ‘special kid’ in grade school until they shipped him off to a group home.”

  “We’re all special,” McFall said, overhearing. “But Mr. Buchanan needs a little more care than do others. He’s misunderstood.” McFall banged the door harder. “But he also misunderstands.”

  Bobby tensed. “So, what? Are we trying to evict him?”

  Does this mean we’re McFall’s goon squad now? His enforcers?

  McFall stared at the door as if to open it with the sheer force of his will. “We are merely here to explain that he’s trespassing. He should have left with his family, but apparently he ran away and holed up inside.”

  “Maybe this is a job for the sheriff,” Ronnie said.

  McFall knocked once more. “Sweeney! We won’t hurt you!”

  Then he turned to Ronnie. “I’m concerned that Sweeney would not react well to the sheriff’s arrival, given the Buchanan family history of arrests. He might get confused. Violent. I’d rather handle this privately if possible.”

  Bobby looked around for a weapon in case Sweeney attacked them. He only hoped the guy didn’t have a gun. Ronnie edged behind him, distancing himself from the door.

  “Maybe we should try around back,” Bobby said.

  McFall reached down and tested the door handle, which turned with a corroded creak of protest. He pushed his way inside and vanished into the moldering darkness.

  “You going?” Ronnie asked Bobby in an undertone.

  Rather than answering, Bobby simply stepped into the decrepit structure. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, with only a few lines of sunlight leaking through the windows. At first he thought he was in a small foyer, and then he realized it was actually an open room. The entrance was made narrow by tottering stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers. The odor of rotting pulp hanging heavy in the air.

  “Sweeney!” McFall called, moving deeper into the house.

  A single, naked light bulb hung from a cloth-wrapped wire in the center of the room. Bobby tried the light switch by the door, but nothing happened. He wasn’t surprised. The house appeared to have been built before modern electrical infrastructure was commonplace. And it sure smelled liked mastodons and saber-toothed tigers had been taking a crap in the corners.

  Bobby pulled a newspaper from a nearby pile and held it near the open door. It was the sports section of The New York Times, and a photograph of Mickey Mantle swinging a bat was featured on the front page. The masthead was dated July 17, 1965.

  “Ronnie, you got to come see this,” Bobby said.

  Ronnie whispered “Wow” from the doorway and picked up a National Geographic. “It’s from 1956. I wonder if these are valuable.”

  “Nah, you can find boxes of this junk at yard sales. But if you see any comic books, let me know.”

  McFall was banging around in one of the back rooms, and light suddenly poured into the hallway when he ripped a curtain from its hanger. Dust swirled and cobwebs swayed in the dim illumination and Bobby noticed that the walls of the large room were covered with ragged-edged pages. Rather than pictures and photographs, the pages mostly contained text.

  “This is one creepy place,” Ronnie said. “No way was Sweeney Buchanan living here.”

  Bobby whistled in agreement. “He’s a nut case, all right.”

  A sofa with a faded rose pattern stood angled in one corner, piled high with more magazines, catalogs, advertising circulars, and other printed matter. A blackened stone hearth was blocked by boxes of books, and Bobby wondered if somebody had been burning them to stay warm. He remembered a line from Doris Huntington’s history class that went something like, “Where books are burned, people are next.”

  Well, this isn’t history class. It’s an even bigger waste of time.

  Something clattered in the adjoining room, and McFall said in a calm voice, “Easy now, Sweeney. We’re not here to hurt you.”

  “I know you!” came a high, panicked voice.

  Bobby hurried to the interior doorway, Ronnie right behind him. The two boys stood shoulder to shoulder, afraid to enter. A haggard man—Sweeney, Bobby presumed—was backed into a filthy corner of the bedroom, brandishing a wicked-looking pipe wrench. His eyes were bright with anxiety, but McFall continued to take steady, measured steps toward him, his palm open in front of him.

  “Come on, Sweeney, give me the wrench.”

  Sweeney looked past McFall to Bobby, who felt the man’s gaze plunge into his brain like a barbed harpoon.

  “You’re the coyotes!” Sweeney shouted.

  “Jesus,” Ronnie said.

  “We should have called the sheriff,” Bobby said.

  “We can handle this,” McFall said, but Bobby wasn’t sure whether he was talking to them or to Sweeney. “This is my land now and I take care of my own problems.”

  “Nuh-nuh-not your land,” Sweeney said.

  “Yes, it is. This was McFall property until you Buchanans tricked us out of it. But I’ve come to set things right.”

  McFall took another step forward. Something clacked drily beneath his feet. Bobby glanced around the room. A bare bed with a blanket piled in the middle and a scarred dresser were the only furniture. These walls, too, were plastered with ripped-out pages, only they were arranged in some sort of pattern.

  Letters?

  Ronnie must have seen them as well, because he began deciphering the uneven lines and spelling out the letters. “S-U-M-M … is that—”

  “Summers End,” Bobby read. Is this about Brett’s death?

  McFall was within ten feet of Sweeney now, and the man raised the wrench in a menacing gesture. The room was crowded with the metallic odor of fear and sour sweat. Something clacked and rattled across the floor again, and Bobby looked down at McFall’s feet. Small, thin bones were gathered there like an ivory pile of tiddlywinks.

  “Mr. McFall?” Bobby said, but McFall was staring intently at Sweeney and didn’t seem to hear him.

  “What do you want, Sweeney?” McFall said, as if they were playing a silly game of Truth or Dare.

  “Go away,” the man said, his lower lip quivering. “Away, away, away.”

  “I’m here to help you go away,” McFall said, in an armchair psychologist’s tone.

  “No, you go away,” Sweeney said, rushing at McFall.

  Bobby wasn’t sure what happened next, but he watched as the pipe wrench swung toward McFall’s head, bracing himself for a geyser of bones, blood, and brains. McFall ducked deftly beneath the blow and shoved Sweeney to the floor. Instead of staying there, the man skated across the bones, regaining his balance before making a dash for the door.

  Straight at Bobby.

  Sweeney swung the wrench again, and Bobby pulled back, letting the metal strike against the door jamb. He heard the whistle of air, and splinters peppered his face, but the impact jarred the wrench loose from Sweeney’s hand, and it tumbled to the floor. Bobby thought about driving his fist into Sweeney’s stomach but he hesitated just long enough for Sweeney to slip past him, shove Ronnie against the wall, and take off running through the open front door and into the woods beyond. As he fled, he shouted, “Away, away, away!”

  “Damn,” Bobby said.

  McFall kicked at the bones. “These look like canine bones. I guess our boy’s a genuine hoarder.”

  “Well, the eviction notice worked,” Ronnie said, but his attempt at humor fell flat. “What now?”

  Bobby picked up the pipe wrench. Bits of hair stuck to the hook jaw, held there by a gummy brownish substance. He wondered if Sweeney Buchanan had used it to kill the dogs whose bones had been part of the collection. Assuming they were dogs’ bones.

  No, this is fresher. Those bones are old.

  “Summers End,” Ro
nnie repeated, looking again at the letters on the wall. “What does that mean?”

  “Dude forgot his apostrophe. Stribling would be all over his ass.”

  “Why don’t you back the truck up to the front door, Bobby?’ McFall said. “It’s time to take out the trash.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to burn it if you just want to get it out of the way?”

  “That wasn’t so easy last time, if you’ll remember,” McFall said, looking at Ronnie.

  Bobby wiped at the clinging bits of hair. “I think this is blood.”

  “Dog’s blood?” Ronnie asked.

  “I’m no scientist. Blood is blood.”

  Ronnie looked at McFall. “Now do we call the sheriff?”

  “Yes,” McFall said, taking the wrench from Bobby. “Now we call the sheriff.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “It’s a family decision,” said Linda Day, standing over the pressure cooker on the stove. The release valve spat steam, and water leaked from around the rubber ring that ran along the bottom edge of the lid.

  Ronnie was busy stringing and snapping green beans, his habitual role in the annual canning ritual. Tim was responsible for washing the Mason jars and setting out the proper number of lids and bands. David Day sat at the table and drank beer, proclaiming his work finished—after all, he’d tilled the garden and planted the beans, even though his two sons had handled the weeding, which Ronnie thought was the hardest part of the job.

  “I don’t reckon so,” David said. “This was Day land long before I married you.” He smiled at Ronnie, but Ronnie wasn’t sure he was joking about what he said next. “And these two yard monkeys don’t get a vote. This ain’t a democracy.”

  “I don’t want to move,” Tim said. “I’m already at the bottom of the food chain as a freshman, but at least I have some friends at Pickett High.”

  Ronnie was pretty sure Tim’s objection had a lot more to do with Brandi Matheson than any concern over his social standing in school. Ronnie himself was pretty ambivalent. Now Melanie was pretty much off the radar, and he was almost certainly going to gain a whole new group of friends at Westridge in a couple of months. He practically had one foot out the door already. Maybe he could even get a little apartment near the university.

  But part of him still treasured his roots here. Despite the recent rash of deaths and that bizarre incident with Sweeney Buchanan, Ronnie had quit obsessing over ghosts and demons and the possible return of Archer McFall. The destruction of the red church had eased his mind on that front, even though he still sometimes saw mysterious shapes moving in the river fog. If the dead were indeed returning, they didn’t seem to have much interest in him.

  Oh, face it, Deathboy, you’re just not ready to give up on Melanie, and you’d risk walking through hell and high water for a chance at her.

  “Dad,” he said, peeling a string off a particularly long pole bean, “you know that under North Carolina law, a husband and wife share all community property equally. Since you acquired the land from your family after you and Mom were married—”

  “I don’t want to hear any mumbo jumbo you read in a book somewhere.” David sipped his Budweiser as Linda kept her back to all of them, her expression hidden. “The Days scrapped and clawed and bled on this ground, and that counts for more than the papers some lawyer in Raleigh drew up.”

  Tim came to the table to scoop up handfuls of broken beans, which he placed in a colander for rinsing. “If we don’t get a vote, why did you even bring it up?”

  David gave him a bleary glare. It was Friday evening and the twelve-pack of beer had been severely depleted, which meant Linda would be making a run into town before long. This was probably the only chance the others had to talk any sense into him. “I’m just thinking out loud, that’s all.”

  “We can do a lot with that money,” Linda said, finally turning. With potholders on both hands, she looked like a prizefighter ready to go a few rounds. “We can pay off Ronnie’s school and put some away for Tim’s college, too. You always said you didn’t want your kids to work with their hands if they didn’t have to.”

  “Ronnie’s doing a bang-up job for McFall,” David said. “He’s already making more money than I did as a carpenter, and he’s just day labor. If things pick up around here, he might be better off with a hammer than a pencil.”

  “Nobody uses pencils anymore, Dad,” Ronnie said.

  “Don’t I know it. How much did that goddamned computer cost?”

  “You won’t worry about a computer once you have four hundred thousand dollars,” Linda said, as if such a number were incomprehensible. “That’s nearly twice what Logan Extine offered us a couple of years back.”

  “Offered me, you mean. Extine’s an asshole. I wouldn’t sell to him if I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a belt to tighten up while I was holding it in.”

  “We can pay off the bank, too,” Linda said. “As low as interest rates are right now, we can get a cheaper place somewhere and pay cash. We could get out of debt and start setting some aside for retirement.”

  “Since when did you turn into Rockefeller with boobs?”

  Ronnie glanced at Tim. Something deeper was going on than David’s stubborn mountain pride of ownership. He suspected it had something to do with Linda’s entanglement with Archer McFall. David was pretty stubborn about letting go of a grudge.

  “Since when did somebody ever come in and offer you a way out of all your problems?” Linda said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t won any lotteries lately.”

  “Thirty-six acres,” David said. “And this house I built with my own hands. And you want it to go to the McFalls.”

  “Not the McFalls. To Larkin McFall. He doesn’t have anything to do with whatever bug crawled up your ass and flexed its little tentacles.”

  David crushed his beer can in one muscular hand. It wasn’t completely empty and foam spurted from the top. The pressure cooker whistled and gurgled, expanding to tighten the rubber seal along the lid. Tim turned on the tap to rinse the beans.

  “Besides the garden and the barn, most of that land isn’t even getting used,” Linda said. “You’re paying taxes and not getting anything back.”

  “You ever heard of a little thing called heritage? I was hoping you boys would build your own houses here one day, settle down, raise your families, just like the Days have been doing for generations.”

  “Then how come your brothers moved away?” Linda said. “You wouldn’t even have this place if they didn’t want to sell out and move. And we wouldn’t be so deep in debt, either.”

  “Those woods come in handy when you want a fire in the winter to warm that little tush of yours,” David said, clearly beyond caring about the boys’ embarrassment. “And that pasture land—well, I’ve been wanting some cows and goats, but this damned economy.”

  Ronnie was glad the farm was downsized at the moment. They’d had a small herd of cattle in his youth, and the chores were never-ending. The garden took enough time as it was, and unless Ronnie moved out, he was going to be hoeing rows and yanking weeds for a few more years. He needed all his spare time to study, because he was pretty sure this was his one shot at a degree.

  “I think you’re just too proud to sell,” Linda said. “You’re happy to rent yourself out, though. You take McFall’s dinky little checks for a week of work, but then you turn down a big payoff because you’re afraid to be really free.”

  “Big talk coming from you,” David said. “You know all about whoring for a McFall.”

  Ronnie was afraid for a moment that his mom was going to pick up the simmering pressure cooker and fling it at his dad. Instead, she laughed like a little girl. “Maybe there’s a reason the McFalls always get what they want. Look at their competition.”

  David launched out of his chair, knocking it to the kitchen floor. He swept his arm across the table, scattering the pile of beans Ronnie was preparing. His eyes contained that same cornered brightness that Sweeney Buchanan�
��s had the previous day, and Ronnie wondered for the first time if his father was capable of murder. Tim shrank back toward the hallway, holding the colander before him as if it were a catcher’s mitt that might deflect whatever dangerous object David hurled his way.

  David tensed, his eyes flitting around as if looking for something to smash. Ronnie met his gaze and held it, hoping David didn’t see the butcher knife lying on the counter beside the packed jars of beans.

  You’re the man of the house, Ronnie’s eyes said, although his heart was thundering a completely different message. Whatever you do will stay with us forever, no matter where we go.

  “Sorry about the beans,” David said, sagging a little. Even the pressure cooker was silent as he walked to the refrigerator and pulled out the remnants of the twelve-pack. He left the room with a pathetic attempt to play it cool, pausing only to say, “This is Day land, damn it. Day now and Day later.”

  After the door slammed closed, Linda shucked her pot holders and tossed them on the counter. “Maybe I should talk to Larkin. Get him to up the price a little.”

  “Not a good idea, Mom,” Ronnie said.

  “Neither is letting David Day run our lives into the same shallow grave as the rest of the bunch.”

  Ronnie couldn’t really argue with that. He got on his knees and offered a silent prayer as he collected the spilled beans.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Working weekends now?” Littlefield asked Cindy.

  “News never sleeps.”

  And neither do we lately, at least not together.

  “Don’t be getting any big ideas about running a story on Sweeney Buchanan,” Littlefield said. With only a few months left in his term, and Cindy insinuating herself ever deeper into his daily routine, he’d given up on keeping their relationship secret. They were seated at 24/7 Waffle, which was surprisingly crowded even for a Saturday morning. The place was at capacity, and several of the booths were filled with unfamiliar faces. Littlefield figured the tourism season must be picking up, and the local Chamber of Commerce would certainly welcome the SUVs full of money rolling into town.