Solom Page 5

  The barn door beckoned. Twenty steps and Katy would be out of there, away from animated scarecrows and footfalls and demented goats.

  And away from Jett.

  Katy paused, heart like a horseshoe in her throat.

  She couldn’t leave Jett here.

  If Jett even was here.

  The barn had grown darker, the sun settling behind the trees on the ridge line, fingers of deep red light reaching across the valley. The footsteps above had ceased. Katy’s palm was a wooden knot around the knife handle. What good would a knife do against an animated scarecrow? Even if she shredded the cloth, dug into the chest and found the ragball heart, would that even slow it down? Or would it keep crawling, rubbing against her, choking her with its chaff, that uneven grin never changing?

  A knock came from one of the stalls. It was soft but insistent, like the hammering of a dying rain.

  “Jett!”

  Katy hoped to God Jett was back in the house. Even if the house was haunted, it couldn’t be worse than this hell-shack of a barn. Katy backed away from the scarecrow twitching before her. Hallucinations and fleeting visions were one thing, and maybe a transparent woman walked the Smith house, but now she was dealing with a stack of rags and silage that did everything but talk.

  Katy backed away, but the thumping in the stall was behind her. Whatever was making the sound couldn’t be worse than the scarecrow. It had stopped moving, but she was sure it was holding its breath, waiting for her to come closer, tensing its fibrous muscles and licking its corn-kernel teeth with a parched tongue.

  She turned and made for the stairs. Maybe if she reached the loft, she could signal Jett and tell her to go for help. Except what kind of help was there against a living scarecrow? Calling Ghostbusters and requesting a smarmy Bill Murray and his team to take the next flight down?

  Gordon would be home any minute. He would know some mountain saying or folk spell to cast on the scarecrow, a secret passed down through the generations. That was the way these things worked, wasn’t it? Evil countered by a good and courageous heart?

  But if those were the weapons, what chance did Katy have? Her own heart was dormant, and besides her feelings for Jett, hadn’t been used much in the last few years. She loved Gordon, but was no longer sure what the “L”-word meant. She couldn’t really love God because of all the things He had visited upon her, but she was trying hard for Gordon’s sake. But if Gordon, or God, or even Bill Murray, could get her out of this barn, she would be his emotional slave until the end of time.

  The stall door opened to her right, and Abraham the goat emerged from the inky depths, his eyes glittering. He ignored Katy and went straight toward the scarecrow. The wad of dead vegetation probably smelled like a gourmet feast to the goat. Katy climbed three steps, stopping on a warped tread to watch the encounter.

  The scarecrow regarded the goat with something approaching curiosity, as much as that expression could be suggested by the blank, stitched-up face. Ascribing human characteristics to the face was nothing more than projection, but Katy couldn’t help it. She had seen its foot move. She’d heard the legends.

  Abraham’s nostrils flared, then he lowered his head and approached the scarecrow, the horns curled flat against his skull but still menacing. Twenty feet separated the two creatures—a little voice inside Katy admitted she had already accepted the scarecrow as an organic part of this strange, ancient world of Solom—when the boots sounded upstairs again.

  “Jett?”

  Please, God, let her be safe in the house.

  Except why should God listen to Katy?

  Abraham reached the scarecrow, which lay still and prone like a willing sacrament. The billy goat sniffed at the stuffed sock, lowered its bearded chin, and nudged the toes. Katy expected the scarecrow to kick out, to sit up and dig its teeth into the furry neck. Instead, Abraham clamped his teeth onto the sock and tugged, lifting the sock free, showering straw across the ground.

  It was just a stupid goddamned scarecrow.

  Katy was angry at herself for wasting the last moments of daylight letting her mind run wild. What if a stoned-out Jett had wandered off into the woods? Maybe that light in the forest had belonged to her, maybe she had taken a flashlight and run away from home. In Charlotte, she would head straight for Deidre’s house, or the video arcade at the mall, or one of the music stores, to chill out until the drugs wore off. Here in the country, the only place to run was into the woods.

  That didn’t change the fact that someone was in the barn. Unless it, like the house, was haunted.

  She went up the stairs to the loft door. It was locked. Had she slipped the latch herself, as she’d exited? She couldn’t remember. Below her, Abraham ate the scarecrow’s meat with a satisfied chuff.

  Katy entered the loft again, determined not to leave until she’d found the owner of the boots, if one existed. The loft wasn’t as dark as the space below, but the shadows between the stacked bales had grown deeper. The knife was heavy in her hand and her muscles ached with tension. A charred and pungent odor wended past, and she recognized it as scorched cabbage. She would probably burn the house down. Gordon would be livid. The structure had survived nearly two hundred years of Smiths and Katy would manage to raze it in less than two months.

  “Okay, whoever you are,” Katy called out, giving her words force to hide the tremor in her throat. Supermom, that was she. “My husband’s on his way.”

  If the trespasser was familiar with Gordon, which was likely, he might not be intimidated by the pudgy professor’s wrath. But the jerk might know Gordon’s habits, too, and that he rarely arrived home before dark. He would know Katy and Jett were by themselves and the nearest neighbor was a quarter-mile away. So Katy added, “I called the Sheriff’s office.”

  Something thumped, the sound muffled by the piles of hay. A patch of lesser gray shifted against the darkness. Katy swallowed hard.

  The boots drummed, or maybe it was Katy’s heart.

  The shape charged her in a shower of dust and straw.

  Katy raised the knife, her scream reverberating off the tin roofing like stage thunder in a theater.

  The goat stopped in front of her, head lifted, the oblique eyes gathering the faint light and reflecting it in emerald streaks.

  A GOAT.

  A goddamned goat had been walking around up here, scaring the stuffing out of her. It must have smelled the hay, climbed up the stairs, and gotten itself locked in.

  But who had locked the door?

  Katy was on her way to the stairs again when she heard the moan. A barn owl?

  No. It came from inside one of the wooden grain barrels that stood near a feed chute. What sort of animal would she find in there? A wounded possum or a feral cat giving birth?

  How could she not look?

  Jett was curled inside, arms folded over her face.

  “Jett, honey,” Katy said. She sniffed for dope but it could have been something taken internally. Jett’s eyes were bloodshot but, even in the weak light, her pupils appeared normal. “Honey, what happened?”

  The girl’s mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, her face like a ghost’s in the blackness of the barrel. She blinked and looked around as if she’d fallen asleep on a car trip. “Where am I?”

  “The barn.”

  “Where am I?”

  Drugs. Katy thought they’d left all that behind, and that drugs would be impossible for Jett to find in the rural mountains.

  “You’re in the barn, Jett.” She would save the mother-daughter talk for later, maybe bring Gordon into the act. Gordon wasn’t yet a potent father figure, but he knew how to lecture. Right now, she wanted to get Jett in the house so she could check her pulse.

  “There was a man ...” Jett said.

  “No, there’s nobody up here. Just a goat. I looked. How did you get in the barrel?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The nanny goat, its belly swollen with pregnancy, came over and watched as Katy pulled Jett from
the barrel and helped her down the stairs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mouse doodie.

  Sarah Jeffers ran her broom along the baseboard of the counter. The counter stood by the front door of Solom General Store and was dark maple, the top scarred by two million transactions. Most of the lights were turned off for closing time, and the dolls, tools, mountain crafts, and just plain junk that hung from the ceiling beams threw long shadows against the walls. After all her years as proprietor, the aroma of tobacco, woodstove smoke, Dr. Pepper, and shoe polish had seeped into her skin like water.

  The store had been built during the town’s heyday just before World War I, when the timber industry made its assault on the local hardwoods. The train station had been a bustling place, bringing Sarah’s grandparents to the mountains from Pennsylvania. The Jeffers, who had once gone by the family name of Jaffe, built the store from the ground up, collecting the creek stones for the foundation, trading and bartering for stock, even breeding their own work force. They were Jewish but no one paid that any mind, because they kept closed services in their living room and the store remained open on both Saturdays and Sundays.

  When the forest slopes were nothing but stumps and the timber cutters moved on, the sawmill shut down. After that, it was like the hands ran backwards on the clock. The earthern dam slowly eroded on Blackburn River, and the little housing settlement that sprang up around the mill began succumbing to the gray and ceaseless weight of gravity. Though the first Fords had made occasional visits over the dusty mountain roads, mostly driven by lumber barons who wanted to check on their investments, the town’s slow exodus was almost entirely via horse-and-wagon. By the Great Depression, Solom was little more than a whistle stop on the Virginia Creeper railroad line. Then came the great 1940 flood, sweeping away the station and a third of the remaining houses, killing a dozen people in the process.

  Sarah’s grandparents died within weeks of one another, and the three children fought over who had to stay and run the store. The short straw belonged to Sarah’s father Elisha, who promptly took on a Primitive Baptist wife, Laurel Lee, because she knew addition and subtraction and silence. Through it all the general store stood on its little rise above the river, the stock changing with the times. Chesterfield tobacco pouches and Bugler papers gave way to Marlboro tailor-mades, hoarhound stick candy disappeared from the shelves in favor of Baby Ruths. A Sears & Roebuck catalog by the register once allowed a mountain family to order practically anything a New York city slicker could buy, but that had been replaced by a computer during the Clinton era. Sarah didn’t trust it, had even named it “Slick Willy” and suspected it of swallowing a dollar once in a while, and the screen stayed black unless Gretta, the thick-ankled college student who worked part-time, was on the clock.

  The computer was one of the few modern touches, besides the sheer volume of cheap imported crafts designed to look folksy. The wall adornments—rusty advertising signs, farm implements, and shelves of old ripple glass bottles—furthered the illusion that the general store was lost in a time, a nostalgic reminder of more carefree days. Sarah didn’t buy the illusion, but she sold it. Times were better raking in leisure dollars rather than dunning the local folks for nickels.

  Sarah had grown up in the store, dusting the shelves and tallying pickled eggs in her plain cotton shift. She remembered when the store’s first indoor toilet was installed, and though as a four-year-old she’d had a great fear of the roaring flush of water, she’d had an even greater fear of hanging her bare bottom over that stinky black hole in the outhouse. Even back then, she’d pushed a broom, and had asked her mother about the numerous little black needles amid the stray hair, spilled sugar, dried grass, and dirt.

  “Mouse doodie,” Laurel Lee had said. “A mouse goes to heaven in a country store.”

  Sarah had always thought of those mice as happy, blessed creatures, scurrying under the floorboards, worrying their way through sacks of feed grain, chewing into the corners of corn flake boxes. But after nearly seventy years of sweeping up their damned doodie, she was about ready to wish them to a Baptist hell.

  But at least the mice gave her something to blame when strange sounds echoed through the aisles. She didn’t like being in the store alone, but she could barely afford her two part-time helpers. So she’d spent the past decades running the broom, ignoring the evidence of her ears, and not thinking about the scarecrow man.

  The bell over the screen door rang. It was ten minutes after seven, past closing time, but she hadn’t locked the door. The porch light bathed the deck in yellow light, and Sarah squinted against it at the bulky shadow.

  “Howdy,” she said. It was still tourist season in the mountains, though the Floridians and New Yorkers were usually tucked away in their Titusville hotel rooms by now, afraid of getting a mosquito bite, or else squirrelled away in their Happy Hollow rental cabins at $150 a night. The kayak and rafting trade from Sue Norwood’s little shop had boomed a little along the river, helping the general store keep its head above water. Seemed like every time the business wanted to sink down to the sandy bottom and take a nice, long nap, some money-making scheme came along and dragged it back to the surface for another gasp.

  The shadow stood in the door, hands in pockets, the head obscured by an outdated hat with a wide brim. All Sarah wanted was to get a little of his money and send him on his way in time for the latest rerun of “Seinfeld,” delivered via her little satellite dish.

  “Can I get you something?” she said, glad to be shut of mouse doodie for the moment. Her voice had developed a mountain twang over the years, partly unconsciously and partly to help sell the illusion.

  The figure shuffled forward. People in these parts, even the visitors, usually answered when addressed. But occasionally a creep came through looking for the best place in the neighborhood for fast money. She did a mental calculation, figured she had maybe eighty bucks in the register. Worth killing somebody over, these days.

  Sarah leaned her broom against the counter, flicking her eyes toward the shotgun she kept on the second shelf beneath the register. The shotgun was well-oiled but hadn’t been fired in twenty years. Currently it was covered by stacks of the High Country News, a free weekly that was such wretched oatmeal she couldn’t give it away. She’d hidden the newspapers, not wanting to disappoint the friendly young man with the crewcut who delivered them early Thursday mornings. She figured there were at least two months of bad copy between her and the firearm.

  She’d have to talk her way out of this one. “Got a special on canned ham,” she said. “Nine dollars. Let the missus take an evening off from the kitchen.”

  Nothing, not even a grunt. The man was three steps inside. She wished she’d left more lights on. It was the electrical cooperative’s fault. In her father’s day, the Blackburn dam had a generator, cranking out enough juice to light up the store and two dozen homes. Then the co-op came in and hooked five counties together, and you had to be on the grid or off, no in between. After that, the power bill had gotten higher every month.

  Sarah could make out the man’s form now, the collar of his coat turned up even though the fall had yet to turn chilly. The front brim of the hat was angled down, keeping the face in shadows.

  The stranger stood there, his breath like the whistle of a distant train. Something creaked in the hardware section, in the back corner of the store that Sarah avoided after sundown. Things went wrong in that corner: alkaline batteries leaked, boxes of nails busted open for no good reason, the fingers of work gloves somehow grew holes. Her father had sold guns, and the ammunition used to be locked away in that corner, but one afternoon some of the bullets somehow got hot and exploded, sending lead fragments whizzing over the heads of the customers. Sarah wished for a magic bullet right now, one that would knock the stranger’s hat off his head.

  Because the hat didn’t belong.

  “Your first trip to Solom?” Sarah said, keeping her voice steady. She eased toward the counter, closer to the re
gister and the shotgun. She’d been driving some tacks into the shelf so she could hang her metal signs, the ones that said “A Bad Day Of Fishing Beats A Good Day of Work” and “I Ain’t Old, I’m Just Experienced.” She leaned on the counter with one elbow, her other arm reaching for the hammer. It felt good in her hand.

  “You staying up at the Tester B & B?” she asked the mute man. “Or the Happy Hollow cabins?”

  Sarah brought the hammer closer to her hip, imagining its arc as she brought it into the dark, unseen face. Her lips creased into the tired, welcoming smile she gave to first-time customers, an expression meant to elicit pity and a desire to help out a little old lady by giving her money. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

  The stranger stepped into the light, lifted his hat, and smiled. “Once I was,” he said, in a voice as patient as a river and as deep as a subterranean cavern. “But that was a while back.”

  Sarah dropped the hammer, nearly breaking her big toe.

  ***

  Jett didn’t have an appetite, so Katy put her to bed early after checking for signs of drug use. Her daughter’s respiration and pulse were slightly elevated, but that could have been from the fright. Jett’s eyes weren’t bloodshot but were wild and frantic, and they kept flicking toward the corners of her room and the closet door.

  “He was a tall,” Jett said. “Wearing black, with an old hat.”

  “Let’s talk about this after supper, honey.”

  “Can I leave my light on? Please?”

  “Sure.”

  Jett had never been afraid of the dark, not since the age of three. Katy felt guilty for leaving her upstairs, but she had to salvage dinner before Gordon arrived. She was reluctant to tell Gordon about the incident. As conservative as he was, he would want to search Jett’s room. It was a showdown in which everybody would lose. Besides, Jett said she had quit drugs, and Katy gave her daughter the benefit of a doubt. People changed, and they changed a lot faster when they were new and still learning to be people.