One of Us Page 17

  The building itself is on the National Register of Historic Places. A plaque outside explains its sinister role in the Nellies’ crimes. This is where they met to plot and conspire against the mine bosses and plan their murders, or maybe it’s where they met to drink and do nothing more.

  No one will ever know the whole truth about what happened. I doubt anyone even knew at the time. Written statements were never taken. No journals or letters existed. The miners and their families were illiterate. The subject was taboo. People wouldn’t talk; some because they were trying to protect the Nellies, but many because they were afraid of them. The Nellies could be just as deadly to their own kind as they were to their enemies if they thought someone was against them.

  The bartender sets a beer down in front of Rafe as he swipes away an empty.

  “I’ll have the same,” I say. “And a shot of whiskey. Make it two.”

  Rafe looks at me out of the corner of his eye. He knows I don’t drink much.

  “One of those for me?”

  “Make it four,” I call out.

  The drinks arrive.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asks.

  I raise the beer to my lips, take a few gulps, and throw back both shots.

  Rafe watches me carefully.

  “I just met a fembot,” I tell him.

  sixteen

  WAKING THE NEXT MORNING from a dreamless sound sleep startles me almost as much as coming out of one of my nightmares. I marvel at the sight of my calm prone body extending down the length of the couch neatly covered with a blanket. The pillows are beneath my head where they belong. I’m not sweating, twitching, palpitating, or hyperventilating.

  The sun is shining and the light reflects off the icicles hanging outside the windows, scattering Tommy’s drab carpet with shards of rainbow. I can almost believe my talk with Walker Dawes and the note Tommy found in his mailbox were part of a bad dream I didn’t have.

  I told Rafe about both while drinking at the Rabbit and also about meeting Scarlet. He listened and didn’t mock my suspicions about Scarlet, but he also didn’t take them seriously.

  He said we’d talk about it more today. He invited me to work at the police station. Tommy doesn’t have an Internet connection and the nearest Wi-Fi is at the McDonald’s in Hellersburg. When I tried to work there two days ago after bringing Mom home, I was informed by a large, pimply female employee half my age who called me “hon” that if I was going to sit there all day I had to buy more than a coffee. I ordered a salad. When I went there again yesterday evening, she told me her manager said I was going to have to order “something with meat in it.”

  I haven’t even made it off the couch before I hear the tap of Tommy’s cane. He comes into the room from upstairs, fully dressed and looking like he’s on a mission.

  We didn’t say another word to each other yesterday about the note. We also haven’t had a talk about Mom’s situation.

  “Is Mom still asleep?” I ask him.

  “Fast asleep. She had a bad night so I got her to take a sleeping pill,” he says guiltily. He could never have convinced her to take one willingly. “She should be out for a while still.”

  He heads for his coat and cap.

  “Where are you off to at this hour?”

  “Emergency breakfast meeting of the NONS.”

  I can’t help smiling. He sees me.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but what happened to Marcella Greger is serious business.”

  “I agree, but it doesn’t involve the Nellies.”

  “Everything here involves the Nellies.”

  He slowly lowers himself into his chair to sit while he puts on his boots.

  “I was just thinking the other night about Prosperity back when he was just little Jimmy McNab staring at those pictures he loved so much daydreaming about coming to America. If he’d never seen those pictures he might not have ended up here. You and I would’ve never existed and Marcella Greger might still be alive.”

  I follow the reasoning behind the first part of his last statement, but the second is a little convoluted.

  “I thought little Jimmy McNab ended up here because he got arrested when he was fourteen and his aunt put him on a boat to America rather than live with the embarrassment of the nephew she’d raised being put in jail. What did that have to do with the pictures?”

  “He loved those pictures,” Tommy begins.

  I knew he’d take the bait. I’ve heard this tale countless times, just like all the other stories about Prosperity, but I never tire of any of them.

  “He’d take any opportunity to go to the shop in town where they hung behind a counter. They were black-and-white ink etchings titled Scenes of American Life. The first one showed cowboys and Indians racing toward each other across a prairie on crazy-eyed horses, guns blazing, tomahawks raised, all of them smiling with the maniacal glee of men who enjoy massacre. It was called Land of Danger.

  “The second was a picture of a black locomotive, again racing across a prairie, with men leaning out the windows shooting at huge, bulky, hairy beasts who seemed to be all head (he’d find out someday they were called buffalos) and beautiful women with curls peeking out from beneath high hats cheering on the carnage. This one was called Land of Progress.

  “The last one was his favorite and it depicted a serenely content farm family of four—a father, mother, son, and daughter—standing in front of bountiful fields stretching into the distance where they melted into a sparkling sea perfectly suited for swimming and boating. It was called Land of Prosperity.”

  When I was a child, this was always the moment in the story where I’d butt in and point out excitedly, “Just like his name!”

  To which Tommy would nod and say, “That’s how he came to have that name. When he got to America he only spoke three words of English. Do you know what they were?”

  “Danger, progress, and prosperity,” I’d provide.

  “Exactly,” he’d reply. “Now, the men he worked with in the pits in Lost Creek were very familiar with the word ‘danger,’ and the word ‘progress’ held little interest for them, but ‘prosperity’ was an impressive-sounding bit of language. Before you knew it, that’s what they were calling him.”

  Tommy catches himself as he realizes he’s started to tell me a story I know well enough to recite word for word. He grabs hold of his cane and starts to get up. I make a move to help him and he waves me away.

  “I was going over to the police station. Rafe said I could use their Wi-Fi,” I tell him. “Will Mom be okay alone?”

  “I should be back before she wakes up.”

  I wait until he and his truck rattle off down the street, then I get dressed in a pair of J. Crew broken-in chinos, a Tom Ford mulberry cable-knit crewneck, Zegna leather-and-waxed-canvas laceless wingtips, and a John Varvatos navy blue peacoat with a subtle metallic sheen. I’m anticipating a casual day.

  During the drive to the station house, I notice a fair amount of vehicles parked along the main street and people milling around the gallows taking pictures with cameras and their phones again.

  Parker hasn’t taken another hostage. Rafe warned me about this. He told me since news of Marcella Greger’s murder and the hanging stick figure painted in blood has spread, the town has lost its collective mind. For the first time since the living Nellies roamed these hills, doors are being locked, guns are being propped in the corners of bedrooms, spilled salt is being tossed over shoulders, and prayers are being frantically whispered upon hearing the usual bumps in the night.

  Residents have been calling with reports of strange happenings that they insist can’t be explained, funny noises, and sightings of lights bobbing in the woods.

  A woman laid out a pink nightgown on her bed before she went to take a shower; when she came back the nightgown had been replaced with her green one. A ma
n parked his snowmobile in his garage front end first, but when he went to take it out again, someone had turned it around. A microwave oven started without anyone pressing any buttons. Several dollars in loose change and a six-pack of beer disappeared from an unlocked car parked in the owner’s driveway. The stools at the Red Rabbit were stacked on the bar right side up instead of the usual upside down. A garden gnome went missing.

  Rafe has been unable to display the slightest bit of concern over any of these reports and has sent Billy and Troy and the two other officers employed by Creekside Township to respond to the calls, while he spends most of his working hours looking into the Marcella Greger murder even though the investigation has been officially taken over by the state police.

  I find Billy Smalls standing inside the door of the station house staring in a kind of weary amazement at a rapidly talking, wildly gesticulating woman. Troy is supporting a swaying drunk by the forearm.

  I greet them both then take a seat behind Rafe’s desk, possibly the most impersonal workstation I’ve ever encountered. No family photos or sports memorabilia clutter the area. No notes or comics are posted on the filing cabinet with amusing magnets. Even the cup holding his pens is devoid of a logo.

  I Skype Max. He appears on my computer screen, his elliptical bulk filling it like a satellite photo of a verdant planet. He’s dressed like a forest in an evergreen mock turtleneck beneath a moss green suede jacket with a grass green silk pocket square.

  “I haven’t scheduled anything for you for the rest of the week and through the weekend,” he begins before I can say a word. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

  “I’ll be back in three days for Carson’s execution.”

  Max says nothing. He reaches for his coffee mug offscreen.

  “I thought you had decided not to go.”

  “He asked me to be there. Plus I had a nightmare about it,” I explain. “It was my subconscious telling me I should go.”

  “Are you sure about that? Maybe you should talk to a shrink?”

  “I know your feelings on this subject, but I feel differently.”

  He clams up and drinks his coffee, his way of showing his disapproval, but he’s never able to keep quiet for long. Disapproval is one of his favorite topics.

  “He sodomized, castrated, and murdered little boys,” he erupts. “And please don’t let the next words out of your mouth be that he’s not all that bad.”

  “I would never say that. He is all that bad.”

  “How’s your grandfather?”

  “He’s fine. It turns out there was no reason for me to come here after all.”

  “There was a reason,” he says. “There are lots of reasons, I’m sure.”

  We finish our call. I settle in to do some actual work, but within a few minutes I’m distracted by the temptation to Google Scarlet Dawes. Once I do this, the floodgates of my curiosity are thrown open and before I know it I’ve moved well past the typical socialite photos of her at gala events and parties on the arms of tycoons and celebrities and go to a site of archived newspaper stories I often use when researching clients and their families.

  Scarlet’s life appears to be relatively uneventful except for two very eventful events both notable for the level of horror and tragedy surrounding them along with the fact that Scarlet was nearby for both though not implicated in any way. The first is the suicide of her nanny. The second is the accidental death of a classmate at the private school she attended as a teen.

  I travel all the way back to the day of her birth and find a front-page newspaper clipping of Gwen and Walker Dawes taking their newborn daughter, Scarlet, home from the hospital. Gwen’s wearing a chic, polka-dot dress and high heels just forty-eight hours after giving birth. She’s holding the infant in one arm and waving with the other, her smile looking strained. Walker’s smiling, too, but without showing any teeth. He has one hand on her shoulder and holds out the other in front of him like he’s stopping traffic or heading for the end zone.

  Only our local paper would consider this event important enough to make the front page and would use the headline “It’s Not a Boy!”

  I hear clicking and clacking coming from behind me. I crane my neck around and find Rafe looking over my shoulder at my computer screen.

  He walks around and takes a seat on the corner of his desk.

  “I’ve been doing a little poking around about Scarlet,” I tell him, glancing back at my screen.

  “Me too. Did you stumble on the story about the death of one of her classmates at her boarding school?”

  “Just the bare facts.”

  “I made some calls. The girl died of an allergic reaction to penicillin. She knew she had the allergy and so did everyone else. No one could imagine how she’d end up taking it accidentally. She had tried to commit suicide before so they chalked it up to that. This was one of the reasons why she was there. It was a loony bin as far as I’m concerned, but the nice way of putting it would be to say it was a special school for very rich troubled girls.”

  “Why was Scarlet there?”

  “We’d have to ask her parents.”

  We fall silent, each of us mulling around our own thoughts.

  “Getting back to Marcella Greger and your theory,” Rafe says, “have you come up with a motive?”

  “Could it have something to do with Anna’s death? Maybe Marcella knew something incriminating and Scarlet killed her to keep her quiet?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to try and figure it out,” Rafe replies. “We’re going to start by talking to someone who was there. Let’s go for a ride.”

  We’re walking toward the door when a roar of engines comes from outside the station. Everyone inside stops what they’re doing and heads for the windows.

  “The Ghost Sniffers!” Billy Smalls cries out.

  Two large vans have pulled up in the parking lot, one solid black and the other custom painted in an elaborate swirling montage of ghosts and ghouls surrounded by neon green. “The Mayhem Machine” is written out in bones dripping with blood.

  “It looks like a diabolical version of the Mystery Machine from the Scooby Doo cartoons,” I say.

  “That’s what it is,” Billy explains, barely able to contain his excitement. “They’re kind of based on Scooby-Doo, but they’re not funny and they use real people.”

  The passenger-side door of the Mayhem Machine opens and a young woman gets out. She’s dressed completely in skintight black leather. The only areas of exposed flesh are her hands, throat, and considerable cleavage, and all of it is covered in tattoos. Flames leap up her neck licking at her jawline, giving the impression that she’s peering out of a burning building.

  Her face might be considered pretty but I can’t tell because I’m too distracted by the various metal rings protruding from her nose, upper lip, and eyebrows. Her long, straight, jet-black hair has an iridescent gleam to it and oozes down her back like an oil spill.

  “Define ‘real people,’” Rafe comments.

  “That’s Bambi,” Billy tells us.

  I think of the clean, perky, fiery-haired cartoon Daphne with her lilting voice and pink tights from my youth. I almost want to cry.

  “And that’s Brick.”

  A hulking brute comes around from the driver’s side. Despite the cold, he’s not wearing a coat. I’m not sure he could find a coat to fit over his massive upper arms and shoulders, one of which is tattooed with a blood-soaked woman being devoured by the undead. His head is shaved except for a spiky black Mohawk down the center. He sports a thick utility belt hung with a walkie-talkie, a flashlight, a hatchet, a water bottle, a crucifix, and a canister of hair gel. He has a skull ring on every finger and his nails are painted black.

  A tall, gangly, goateed African American in a purple tracksuit, untied red high-tops, a gold ball cap with the bill worn to the side,
dark reflective shades, and a long fur-lined purple trench coat disembarks from the other van.

  Troy steps up beside us.

  “Z Mac,” he says. “Short for Zombie Master.”

  I look over at Rafe, who stares at the ceiling.

  I’m afraid to ask but I must.

  “Where’s Velma?”

  Z Mac joins Bambi, who’s begun combing the air with a device that looks like a cross between a waffle iron and a calculator, while Brick trudges back to the other van and pulls open the side door.

  A small, trim man with a perfectly round pink-cheeked face wearing glasses set in perfectly round tortoiseshell frames jumps out. He, like Bambi, is dressed entirely in black. They may in fact be wearing the same leather jeans and combat boots in the same size, but his upper body is differently attired in a turtleneck and a long black suede coat with its hem flapping at his heels.

  “There’s Velma,” Troy says.

  “Velma is a man?”

  “Kind of,” Billy replies.

  A crowd of onlookers has already started to gather around the Ghost Sniffers. I don’t know where they came from so quickly, but I imagine the sight of these newcomers to have the same hypnotic pull as an alien spaceship setting down in the town square.

  Velma disregards the traffic slowing as it passes by and the gawkers trickling toward them. He says something to his companions, then turns and marches toward the station and pushes open the doors double-handed like a tiny gay gunslinger.

  “Excuse me,” he addresses no one in particular. “Who’s in charge here?”

  We all look at Rafe, who doesn’t say anything.

  Troy and Billy step forward together and introduce themselves.

  Velma gives them an appraising look before pulling off one black leather glove one finger at a time and extending his hand in midair waiting for one of them to shake it. Troy goes first.

  “We always make our presence known with local law enforcement before we begin an investigation as a courtesy so there won’t be any misunderstandings,” Velma says briskly.