The Preacher: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 3) Page 8

  The whisper was so soft Katy assumed it was her own thought. But the feminine tone wasn’t quite her own, and she’d never thought in someone else’s voice before.

  Rebecca?

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Jett said. “You’re staring off into space like you just got a lobotomy.”

  Katy vigorously shook her head, sending her red tresses brushing across her shoulders. Rebecca was dead and gone, resting in a peace she well deserved. Katy was cracking up when she could least afford it.

  Maybe that was how Solom did its work. Maybe Gordon had been a perfectly sane man, a studious professor dedicated to his research while still maintaining a passion for the family farm. Maybe he’d simply stayed in Solom too long, and the exposure to the house had seeped into his blood and poisoned his mind and soul. Maybe Gordon had felt the insidious creep of Solom but he, too, had been unable to leave.

  “It will all make more sense in the light of day,” Katy said. “Maybe you should come sleep in my room.”

  Now Jett shook her head, suppressing a nervous grin as she rolled out of bed and grabbed her pillow. “Still can’t admit you’re scared, huh?”

  “No, I can’t.” Katy grinned back. “But first, will you come down and check the locks with me?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Odus awoke with a start, his back throbbing and stiff.

  At first he didn’t know where he was, only that the graying sky was above him. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d woken up in a strange place, but although he had a headache, he didn’t have that fuzzy, nauseated feeling that usually followed a good drunk.

  He was lying on a rock. And then it came back to him—Lost Ridge, the Rev. Edmisten, and a goat on a stick. He had no idea what time it was, but the pink haze above the stunted and skeletal trees suggested it was an hour or so before dawn. He rolled onto his side, wincing at the pain, and the empty bourbon bottle slid off his chest and clinked against the granite. His mouth was sticky and dry, and the smell of charcoal and old meat clogged his nostrils.

  Images crowded his pulsing skull, and he couldn’t be sure what was dream and what was memory. He was pretty sure the part about the Rev. Edmisten with the butcher knife and goat’s head was real, but the horse thing might not have happened. Because after the reverend had scraped away the last of the goat’s flesh and tossed it on the fire, a big black horse had ambled out of the scorched forest and come up to the reverend. Odus remembered the horse eating from the reverend’s hand, but after that, everything melded into a mist.

  He rubbed his eyes and blearily surveyed the terrain around him. He couldn’t make out many details, but the reverend’s fire had burned down to a red heap of embers. The goat carcass was no longer splayed across the rock, although there was a dark, viscous coating spread across its surface that looked like blood. Odus wobbled to his feet to find his rifle leaning against the stack of boulders. The reverend—along with the horse—was nowhere to be seen.

  Fine job you did, Odus Hampton. The Horseback Preacher could have trotted up and hog-tied you in your sleep.

  Odus wobbled to his feet and headed to the edge of the clearing, where he relieved himself and then gathered an armful of charred branches. He laid them atop the embers and in a couple of minutes, the fire was crackling. The encircling ring of stones glistened with grease, but Odus didn’t see so much as a bone left behind from the reverend’s feverish sacrifice. The Rev. Edmisten must have cleaned up after himself.

  Or else Harmon Smith came along and accepted the offering.

  In the glow of the firelight, Odus studied the ground around the clearing. Amid the ashes, weeds, and charred bits of wood, the dirt was stirred and gouged. A few boot prints were visible, but he didn’t see any indentions that might have been cast by a hoof. As far as he could tell, the Horseback Preacher hadn’t turned over the reigns to the reverend or even dropped by out of curiosity.

  Which meant he might’ve had business elsewhere.

  Odus retrieved his rifle and headed back down the trail, eyes on the ground. Robins and wood thrushes broke into their cheerful morning songs, oblivious to the dismal, haunted land they inhabited. Life was returning to the burned ground, and soon the briars would be replaced by flowers and saplings, and in two decades, all signs of the cleansing would be gone. But that rock would still be there, and so would Snakeberry Trail, and so too would Harmon Smith’s presence.

  By the time he reached the first sloping shoulder of the ridge, the sky was light enough for him to see the valley below. The Smith farm was quiet, with no signs of life around the house or barn. The chickens would be restlessly clucking and scratching, and the goats would bleat until Katy or Jett let them out of their pens. A low mist wreathed the valley in great gray patches, the autumn colors brightened by the dew. Aside from the car in the driveway and the tractor at the edge of the pasture, the scene might well have been from a postcard a century ago.

  Not too much different than when Harmon Smith lived in a little log cabin down there by the creek.

  But many of the changes were unseen, like currents churning beneath the smooth surface of a lake. Just as all water flowed to the sea, all misery in Solom sprang from this valley and trickled outward to touch hundreds of people. He understood why Katy didn’t sell the place and leave. You didn’t own the Smith farm. It owned you.

  Maybe last year, when that hippie survivalist Alex Eakins had set the top of Lost Ridge afire, he should have burned down the Smith farm instead. Never mind that such a crime would’ve been harder to hide—he doubted if any government officials would have probed too deeply. Hell, even the insurance company would have likely paid up without a peep, and those suit-wearing bastards were tighter than a mouse’s ear.

  But Odus was too weak to do the job himself. Harmon Smith wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  His soreness was gone by the time he reached his truck. He banged the mud off his boots, placed his rifle in the window rack, and checked to make sure nobody had stolen his fishing pole. Something bulged beneath the tarp in his truck bed. He gripped the edge of the tarp as if was made of razors, then whipped it clear.

  There, on top of a coil of rusty chains and a knot of cables and plastic jugs, perched a goat’s skull.

  It was nearly free of flesh, showing only thin strips of pink flesh here and there, bits of fur clinging to the white, gleaming snout. The skull leered in a lipless grin, the blank, black holes of eyes daring Odus to look away. Perched between the two horns was the Rev. Edmisten’s straw hat.

  “Know them by their fruits,” Odus said.

  He was pulling the tarp back over the horrible exhibit when the crackle of gravel alerted him to an approaching vehicle. He turned to see a Pickett County Deputy’s patrol car slowing as it neared, and then coming to a stop. Odus yanked his fishing pole out of the bed and leaned casually against the flank of the truck.

  The officer got out. He recognized her—Deputy Vreeland had been a freshmen at Cross Valley High the year Odus dropped out for good—only back then she’d been Shirley Buchanan, a long-legged blond athlete who likely didn’t foresee a marriage and a career in law enforcement. She’d served a warrant on him once, but it was for an unpaid traffic ticket so he didn’t hold it against her.

  “Morning, Deputy,” Odus said, doing a good job of sounding like he’d not had his first cup of coffee yet. “I’m about to wet my line. Want to join me?”

  “What do you have for bait?”

  He swallowed. If you were going to lie to a cop, it better be a lie that wasn’t easily busted open. “I was going to root for grubs down by the creek. That time of year.”

  She pointed at his reel, the other wrist resting on the butt of her sidearm. “Well, lucky for you I’m on duty, or I’d fill my stringer before you even got that mess untangled.”

  Odus looked down and saw the line was wrapped in loose loops around the reel and the hook and sinkers were missing. For a man who took pride in his gear, this was an embarrassment that almost caused him
to blush. “Got jiggled around in the back of the truck. These gosh-danged back roads, you’d think the county would send out a motor grader once every decade or so. Nothing personal.”

  “I’m a taxpayer, too,” she said. “I just get some of it back on Fridays.”

  He smiled at her, waiting, until it felt like his cheeks were stitched together with baling wire. She wouldn’t have gotten out of her vehicle if she just wanted to make conversation.

  Her police scanner squawked, and she glanced at her vehicle for a moment before turning her attention back to him. “We’ve had a couple of incidents. Since it looks like you were out bright and early, maybe you’ve seen something that can help us.”

  Her piercing, blue-eyed gaze suggested she noticed his rumpled clothes and the odor of sour mash and chalked it up to a long night, too. But Odus was usually rumpled in the best of circumstances, so he figured he’d just bluff it out and she’d soon go on about her business.

  “Be glad to help out if I can. So what happened?” Odus asked.

  He listened, nodding with appropriate solemnity, as she described the animal mutilations committed at two local churches. He did a masterful job of not twitching or blinking when she named the True Light Tabernacle. As Deputy Vreeland spoke, she eased ever nearer to his vehicle, not once acting like she was suspicious but getting close enough to see into his cab and the bed of his truck. It was like a slow dance, the deputy drawing him out and Odus sidestepping every move.

  “Folks will be mighty upset if they pull up for worship tomorrow and there’s yellow crime scene tape all over their graveyards,” she finished. “We can’t allow one or two vandals to upset half the valley.”

  The deputy was overstating the congregations of the two churches by a factor of ten, but Odus got the point. In a conservative area like this, you didn’t screw with the church, the flag, or the Girl Scouts, or there would be hell to pay and possibly a lynch mob carrying the I.O.U.

  “Well, the kind of trash that would do that likely rode over from Titusville, if you ask me,” Odus said. “I hear they have gangs tagging their road signs. Place went to hell when they got a Walmart Supercenter and one of them hookah bars. Getting way too big for their britches over there.”

  “I’ve considered that theory but it doesn’t wash,” she said. “This looks more like the work of someone familiar with the targets. This feels personal.”

  Odus was getting uneasy. He didn’t know how long he could keep his cool. Sweat collected at his hairline, and although he couldn’t smell it, he was sure it stank of Old Crow. He needed to get rid of the deputy soon. “Well, if you’ve connected the dots, then you know there’s one more grave you ought to check. What about the Free Will Baptists?”

  She tilted her head to the side. Back when she was Shirley Buchanan, her wavy blond hair would have fallen in a fetching manner, but now it was bungeed in a tight bob against the back of her neck. “You sound like you know more about this than you’re letting on.”

  “Lots of folks got old grudges against the Smith family, and if you want a little payback, then why not hit at Harmon Smith first?”

  “A Class One felony beats a murder charge, I suppose.” Deputy Vreeland bent for a closer look at his bumper. “So you haven’t caught any fish yet, have you?”

  “Well, no. You see the mess my pole is in.”

  She straightened, and her wrist was back on the butt of her weapon, still closer but definitely with a little more palm involved. Where she could unbutton and draw if necessary. “Then do you mind explaining this drop of blood?”

  The sweat jumped his clenched pores and flowed down his face, tickling in the sunrise. He ran down a list of lies and briefly pondered the truth. But the truth was so unbelievable he’d be in jail before he could say “burnt offerings.”

  “And I reckon I have probable cause for a search without a warrant,” the deputy said. She tugged the tarp out of the pick-up’s bed.

  The goat skull seemed to be screaming “Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mose Eldreth unlooked the church door, determined to finish his carpentry work.

  He was ashamed of his behavior the night before, fleeing the sanctity of the church as if he didn’t trust that it was the House of the Lord. Still, he resisted looking over at the heap of stones that marked one of Harmon Smith’s graves. His own relatives were buried around it, and he’d one day spend his eternal rest on the same hallowed ground. Well, at least his body would. His soul was going to be as far from Harmon Smith as possible.

  As he entered the dim, unlighted church, he vowed to focus only on the work before him. He planned to stain the woodwork after it was nailed into place, then coat it with polyurethane, but he didn’t want the congregation swooning from the fumes. If there was any swooning going on, he wanted it to be because of the sermon. He had a good one mapped out, based on the Book of Revelation. Harmon Smith’s return had served as inspiration.

  Mose, a big fan of Biblical numerology, had twisted 666—the number of Man, according to theologians—into his sermon, although he couldn’t see how those digits tied into Harmon’s return. He’d added them up, multiplied them, and even turned them upside down, and then compared them to every recorded date and incident in Harmon’s historical record. So far, the best he could come up with was that the circuit-riding Methodist once ordered six hymnals at the same time.

  But he needed to be a vessel in these troubled times. Especially when his fellow brethren of the cloth had fallen way short of their duties. David Tester’s Primitive Baptist beliefs were sending a good two dozen people to hell because they refused to get on their knees and do what it took to earn salvation. Sure, they’d get down there and wash each other’s feet, then think of themselves as all humble and pure, but they believed it was up to the Lord to determine who was saved from eternal hellfire. By their reckoning, all folks were hopeless of their own accord. Damnedest thing.

  At least the congregation of the True Light Tabernacle, as slick as they were with their modern Good News Bible and electric organ, knew there was only one path to Glory, and that way was strait and the gate was narrow. But fat old William Edmisten’s greed, gluttony, and avarice served as a living contradiction six days a week to the words he spoke on Sundays.

  And don’t even get me started on those Catholics over in Titusville…

  Mose flexed his back. He had a touch of rheumatism, but he wouldn’t complain, not in the house of He who had suffered the agonies of the cross. Tonight, in his own bed, he could dwell on mortal discomforts. For now, he was in sacred service, and his hammer was a tool of the Lord.

  As he set the last two nails on a corner piece, the hammer blows reverberated in the rafters. Mose went into the vestry to get the broom and dust pan. He couldn’t have the congregation tracking sawdust everywhere, nor sneezing through his sermon. Mose was leaving the vestry when the church’s front door banged open. A breeze skirled the sawdust, filling the air with the scent of pine and the damp autumn morning outside.

  “Odus?”

  Maybe the handyman had forgotten a tool, or had stopped by to see if Mose needed any more help. But judging by the way the man was hitting that bottle, Odus was unlikely to awaken until noon.

  Something stirred outside, low sounds arising from the small cemetery. Mose leaned the broom against the lectern and picked up the hammer, comforted by its weight in his hand. He wasn’t exactly afraid of Harmon Smith, but the Lord helped those who helped themselves.

  The preacher walked down the aisle, as slow as a reluctant groom. He could use this fear in his sermon tomorrow, drum up some dread and paint an image of the everlasting lake of fire, where those who didn’t accept the Lord as savior were doomed to be cast forever. Yes, fear was important, but the Lord was your Shepherd.

  “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” he said, not quite at sermon level but loudly enough to echo off the wooden walls.

  Beyond the open door, a low fog se
emed to have surrounded the churchyard so that Mose couldn’t see the forest beyond it. Patches of shadows swam in the gray soup like deep-sea creatures. Threads of wet smoke skirled along the tops of the grave stones.

  The mist had a peculiar quality and was different from the usual autumn fogs. Each fall, mountain folks counted the number of late fogs and used them to predict the number of snows due in the coming winter. But fog was supposed to be gray-white, and this one had coils of black smut in it. The air stank of rotten eggs.

  The fog appeared to be thickest in the cemetery, as if laying down a cover so bad business could take place. It appeared to plume up from the spot where pieces of Harmon Smith were buried, the Free Will congregation’s share of long-ago shame and triumph. Except Harmon’s alleged murder had been a triumph for the Lord, and worthy of rejoicing. Why, then, was foul fog seeping up from the crazy old preacher’s grave?

  Mose wasn’t afraid, because he had no business with Harmon Smith. And if it was Mose’s turn to get roped and hauled away, well, it would be a short trip to the Pearly Gates. And that was one place Harmon Smith could never enter. Mose would stand behind those golden bars and peer over St. Peter’s shoulder, shaking his fist at the silly sinner in the black hat.

  Harmon’s mission was for the Lord to worry about. Only God could say whether Harmon was looking for his horse or going around visiting his final resting places. And God wasn’t telling, at least not yet. In Mose’s sixty-five years on His good green Earth, God hadn’t shared a whole lot of the whys and wherefores and whens.

  All God wanted was belief and faith, and sometimes it didn’t seem to matter to Him how he kept his people in line. Natural disasters, famine, the diseased deaths of innocents, all could be argued as miracles instead of tragedies. The wayward ambling of Harmon Smith’s soul was no less a mystery, but just as befitting. The Devil walked the pages of the Bible through all the human generations, as big a star as any of the prophets and disciples.