The Cabin on Souder Hill Read online

  “. . . and if I was well enough I’d come over to that office and kick your ass, Clarence. I know he’s there, so you tell him he’d better call me in the next five minutes, or I’ll find a way to get down there. You hear me Clarence?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean it, goddamn it! You tell him to call me. I’m done with this shit—and I’m done with your shit, you lying bastard! You’re always covering for him, Clarence. Why is that? What is it Pink does for you? Do you owe him? I know he doesn’t pay you for shit. Of course, you don’t do shit, so the pay is right.”

  For a moment there was silence on the phone. Pink stared at Clarence. Clarence shrugged back, as if to say, “What do I do now?”

  Pink motioned for him to hang up. Clarence was easing the phone into the cradle when the voice began again.

  “Clarence! Don’t sit there like a fungus! Say you understand. Say you’ll have that fat bastard call me. I mean it, Clarence.” Pink heard Isabelle sniffle, then cough. “Do you hear me?” He wondered if she was crying. A moment later he got his answer. She continued shouting at Clarence, but her words were unintelligible now, runny and drippy with sobbing, like someone arguing under water. Clarence looked over at Pink and shook his head, frowning, thrusting the phone at Pink. Pink shook back violently, mouthing the words, no no no no no.

  There was silence when the bawling stopped. Pink heard Isabelle blow her nose, then she started speaking in a low, calm tone that was more disconcerting than the mewling of a moment earlier.

  “Pink, I know you’re listening on the extension,” Isabelle said. “I’m not protecting you anymore, Pink. There’s something you need to know, something you should have known a long time ago. I won’t protect you anymore.”

  Click.

  Pink held the phone close to his ear. Clarence laid the phone in the cradle then looked up at Pink. Pink hung up and pulled up the collar of his jacket around his neck.

  “I’m going to lunch,” Pink said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  Pink stepped from Clarence’s office, expecting Clarence to say something or ask him to bring back a sandwich but Clarence said nothing. Pink could feel Clarence’s eyes on the back of his neck.

  What a hell of a morning, Pink thought, as he walked to the front door.

  *****

  After lunch, Pink couldn’t go home, and he didn’t want to go back to the office. He browsed the shops along Main Street in Dedmonson, bored out of his mind. Protect him? From what? He couldn’t stop wheeling Isabelle’s statement around in his head. Maybe Claire had some rare disease he could catch, one she’d failed to tell him about? Or maybe Isabelle’s illness was contagious and the only reason he hadn’t caught it was because she had been sneaking some antidote into his coffee and now she would withhold it? Or maybe the Mafia had contract killers stalking him, and she’d managed, each and every time, to thwart their attacks. Picturing Isabelle as some kind of martial arts expert, kicking and punching and spinning, made him chuckle. He stopped at a bakery and ordered coffee and a donut. All this thinking made him hungry.

  Pink sat at a table and checked his cell phone. Five calls from Isabelle and some other numbers he didn’t recognize, probably busybodies who’d seen the newspaper. He punched in the office number. Clarence answered.

  “Any business?”

  “Is that you, Pink?” Clarence asked.

  “No, it’s the IRS and we want to audit you as soon as you make some damn money. Christ, Clarence, who else calls and asks if there’s any business?” Half-wits without an ounce of charisma were selling the entire country out from under the poor and middle-class, two and three times over, while Pink watched from the sidelines. Millions of dollars going to people who didn’t deserve it near as much as he did, poor suckers who happened to be in the right place when no one was watching.

  “Isabelle called again,” said Clarence.

  “Anybody else?”

  “Yeah, lots of people,” Clarence said. “None you’d want to talk to though.”

  “Only call me if somebody has property or wants property. I’m not coming back today. And if Isabelle calls, you tell her you haven’t heard from me.” Pink waited for Clarence to say something. “Hello? Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Pink. You really should give her a call.”

  “And you should wear something other than plastic shoes, Clarence. Where’d you ever get the idea that plastic was good for your damn feet?”

  “She was really upset the last time she called. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to her.”

  “Did Claire call?” Pink asked, suddenly wondering what was going on with her. Silence again. It was starting to irk him. “Clarence?”

  “Yeah, Claire called. I could hardly understand her for the blubbering.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Home, I guess.”

  “My home?”

  “No, her home. She wanted me to tell you she’s back with Kenny. She wants you to call her.”

  Why in the hell did she go back to him? Pink wondered. “Call me on the cell if something important happens . . . like new business.” Pink hung up and checked his messages again. Why weren’t there any calls from Claire if she needed to talk to him so bad? He punched in her number, hoping Kenny didn’t answer the phone. It rang at least ten times before Claire answered.

  “What’s wrong with you, Claire? You sound like shit? You got a cold or something?”

  A second of silence before Claire’s howling bellowed through the phone. Pink tried to quiet her down, but Claire wouldn’t stop long enough to speak, each time choking, strained sounds as though she were hyperventilating. “Breathe into a dang bag, for Christ’s sake,” Pink said. “And why’d you go home to that maniac of a husband? He’s the one started all this in the first place.”

  “She said . . . horrible . . . things. Horrible, dirty things.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t . . . talk . . . right now . . . Pink,” Claire said, sniffling and crying. Her voice trailed off in a slow, melting whine until the phone clicked and went dead. Pink clamped his cell shut and shoved it in his pocket.

  “What the hell is going on?” Pink said to himself. “Have they both got some crazy gene that’s kicked in?”

  Pink couldn’t stand another second window-shopping in Dedmonson. He knew of a strip club in Burryville, not far from the casino. It was an hour’s drive, but he had nothing else to do. If he couldn’t find a girl at the club to spend the night with, he figured he’d go back to his mama’s house to sleep, give Isabelle time to cool off. By morning, everything would be back to normal.

  Chapter 33

  The young man backed his Toyota out of Michelle’s driveway, then stopped on the road and rolled down his window. “Are you going to be okay, Michelle?” he asked, glancing toward her dark cabin.

  “Sure,” she said. “Thanks for the ride. Can I give you some money?”

  “No way. Call me if you want to try mountain biking sometime.” He waved as he drove off. She was glad he declined the money—she didn’t have any.

  This was not how Michelle imagined the evening unfolding, her driving off with some stranger, leaving Darcy behind to worry. Before she’d pulled away with the young man, she’d glanced back at the convenience store and saw Darcy standing in the middle of the parking lot, a brown paper sack in her hand, staring at Michelle. Her face had looked as blank as the bag she was holding.

  Snow drifted outside the cabin while Michelle prepared supper in silence. She wondered where Darcy had gone, if she’d driven back to Atlanta alone, if her sister would ever speak to her again. Michelle hated running out on Darcy like that, but she couldn’t leave. Cliff flashed through her mind, his body frozen under a foot of snow, the dark, ragged hole in his scalp. She would never bleach that image from her mind.

  Michelle scooped spaghetti onto her plate
and sat with her hand resting on the table, noodles wrapping her fork like a mummy. She couldn’t eat, thinking about her sister, about Cliff, everything that had happened, or hadn’t happened. It was maddening. She scraped her spaghetti into the trashcan.

  Michelle didn’t want to sleep, wasn’t even sure she could. Her eyes kept searching out the window for Darcy’s headlights. Snow was coming harder. She took her coat from the closet. Maybe if she stood outside in the cold, fatigue would overtake her, make it impossible to keep her eyes open.

  When Michelle stepped onto the deck, snowflakes settled on her face. Living in Atlanta, she missed real winters like they’d had in Pennsylvania. She looked over the folding chair and wondered if Cliff had intended to kill himself when he positioned it near the railing or had the idea occurred to him later as he stared into the remote and deadening darkness where the light ends, as she was now doing? She felt disconnected from everything in front of her, everything that had happened, a queer crease in her life without time or emotion. She tightened her hands around the aluminum tubing of the chair, the cold biting through the thin flesh of her palms. She bent down and smelled the webbing, as if Cliff should still be lingering there, maybe Cliff from college, flushed and sweating from a wrestling match, or Cliff fresh from the shower, the scent of Irish Spring on his skin, the unimproved Cliff, before he needed that shimmering jolt of new love from another woman, returning home smelling of smoke-fouled perfume. Strange how none of that mattered now.

  Michelle folded the chair and carried it to the far end of the deck, setting it under the overhanging roof. Fresh snow erased the blood-soaked snow and in a few hours, maybe less, the indentations from the chair would be gone as well.

  Michelle walked back to the railing and let her eyes fall down the dark mountainside, into the inexhaustible geometry of pointy limbs and dusky trees. She could have abandoned her senses to the pattern, let it pull her into a sluggish sleep, had it not been for the tiny orange light flickering up at her like a fallen star burning in the snow. It was quite a distance off, maybe several hundred yards, maybe farther, and seemed to radiate pale heat. At first, she thought it might be the dusk-to-dawn light, but it was in the wrong place, its source more organic than electronic.

  Michelle walked to the edge of the yard where the mountainside plunged into darkness. At least with snow covering the ground, she figured it would be easier to see, and picking her way down the slope should be much less difficult. Her theory was immediately quashed when her sneaker slipped on the loose leaves beneath the frozen powder, sending her sliding into sticker bushes and rhododendron. Lying on her back, Michelle looked up toward the cabin, half expecting to see Darcy at the railing shaking her head, disappointed. Michelle pulled herself up by a branch, brushed off her jeans, and stood a moment to steady her footing. The incline gave her a tenuous hold on gravity, her center not quite perpendicular to the earth. She waited until her lungs calmed before testing the hill again. She probably should have brought a flashlight.

  The snow managed to gather enough light from the cloud-filled night sky and to Michelle’s surprise, she had no trouble seeing. The trek down the mountain was invigorating. After several minutes, she felt a fresh momentum gathering in her chest, a kind of helium buoyancy. She figured it was from the cold. The temperature had dropped, but she felt warm, even tranquil. The orange light was closer now, maybe a hundred yards away, and it had a fluttering quality that seemed to indicate a fire of some sort, a campfire maybe, but small and manageable. A trace of apprehension crept in, but she pushed it away and kept moving.

  Whatever fear Michelle may have felt a moment earlier vanished when she saw the house. It was Mattie Souder’s place. She recognized the picket fence and shutters. Light from her backyard colored the trees and limbs in a flickering orange glow, the source partially blocked by the house. It was fire. Michelle hurried past the shrubs that lined the side of the house, expecting to find something ablaze that shouldn’t be. Instead she saw a woman in a black-hooded cloak less than fifty yards from the house, her back to Michelle, her arms raised to the night sky, the flames partially blocked by her body. A ruddy peach smoke rose past her outstretched fingers. The woman stood in the center of a circle of exposed stones, the center oddly free of snow. Michelle crept toward the woman, angling slightly to the side to get a better look. The woman turned away and when she did Michelle saw the fire clearly, and the cauldron hanging above it. The cauldron was not very large, maybe the size of a soup pot. Not even that big. But it was still strange, and Michelle had decided to leave, when the woman called out.

  “Stop there. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  Michelle spun around to see a featureless silhouette, the hood of the woman’s cloak concealing any indication of a face. The woman withdrew an object from the pocket of her cloak. Yellow light glinted along its metallic surface and Michelle knew it was a knife. She should have turned and fled up the mountain, tracked her own footprints through the snow back to her cabin, but she couldn’t move, too mesmerized by what the woman did next. Standing beneath a trellis festooned with colored ribbons, the woman raised the knife against the night, and like a mime, cut a circle into thin air, starting well above her head, sweeping down past her feet, finishing above her head where she’d started. She bowed momentarily and the knife disappeared. Michelle had not seen where she put it. The woman stepped beneath the trellis and moved toward Michelle as if she floated on the snow, her black cloak gliding like a shadow cast from some missing object. Michelle watched her approach, and smelled the charred wood scent of the blaze, smoke twisting up through the limbs, evaporating into the night. When the woman threw back her hood, Michelle recognized her at once.

  “Mrs. Stage?” Mrs. Souder said.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Michelle said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Michelle put aside the lie she’d prepared and asked what she really wanted to know. “Why did you come to my hospital room the other night?”

  With her back to the fire, Mrs. Souder’s features appeared fragile, the grayish night light dusting her cheeks and chin, making her seem exhausted. Michelle held the woman’s gaze, but Mrs. Souder’s eyes slowly lost intensity, as if some mechanism inside her was spinning to a halt.

  “I was . . .” Mrs. Souder said. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I knew the woman in the room with you.”

  “Yes, I know,” Michelle said. “She was relieved that you did.”

  Mrs. Souder turned and walked up the hill toward the house, her cloak stirring up wisps of snow.

  “Wait,” Michelle said. “Why did you go through my locker?”

  The woman stopped, pausing a moment before spinning toward Michelle. “What are you doing here?” the old woman said, the frustration in her voice giving her an edge of desperation. “Why did you come here tonight?”

  “I followed the light down the hill.”

  “Followed the light? Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Not anymore,” Michelle said. “Everything’s so fucked up I think I’ve forgotten how to be afraid.”

  “You should try remembering, dear,” she said, her eyes etching into Michelle’s. “Fear can protect you.”

  “I lost my daughter,” Michelle said. “Did you know I lost my daughter and I have no recollection of her dying? My friends and family all remember. My sister remembers. My husband drove me to her grave. It was very convincing, but somehow, I didn’t believe it. They say she’s been dead for over a year, and yet I spoke with her a week ago. Cassie’s her name.” Michelle was rambling but didn’t care.

  “She’s fifteen and was voted captain of the swim team. She’s not even a senior. Isn’t that wonderful? She’s an excellent swimmer. Cliff didn’t even know she was voted captain. Before my daughter had a chance to tell him, he headed down this mountain”—Michelle turned to point—“looking for a dusk-to-dawn light and never came back. Isn�
�t that crazy? Why would anyone go looking for a dusk-to-dawn light in the middle of the woods? But then I did the same thing. Can you believe that? Yeah, I followed the same light and when I found Cliff, he was missing a finger, and he told me our daughter was dead . . . and . . . and I had . . . my . . . life . . .” For a moment Michelle felt like she was lifting from the ground, weightless, floating.

  “Are you all right, dear?” the old woman asked. “You don’t look well.”

  Michelle closed her eyes, playing back everything she’d said, mortified by how stupid it must have sounded. She felt possessed, as if the words had originated somewhere else.

  “I’m sorry,” Michelle said. “I must have sounded insane. So much has happened lately.” When Michelle realized the woman was holding her arm to steady her, Michelle pulled it back slowly. “I’m okay.”

  “You look pale,” the old woman said. “Come up to the house. I’ll make tea.”

  “No. Thank you. I have to go.”

  “No. I think you should stay.”

  Michelle was disturbed by Mrs. Souder’s insistence. It had the ring of threat, even though her eyes seemed harmless, loving. Michelle followed her into the house, remembering how upset Pink had become when Michelle wandered into Mrs. Souder’s private room. Michelle felt like a sneak not telling her she’d been in the house before, had actually been in her private altar space.

  Michelle sat at the kitchen table, trying to rein in her discomfort, while Mrs. Souder held the teakettle under the faucet. The old woman swiveled toward the stove and slid the kettle onto the burner, then turned up the flame. Michelle couldn’t help picturing her cauldron hanging over the fire, the queer otherworldliness of it, like something from a movie, or a cartoon.

  Mrs. Souder sat down, opposite Michelle at the table, folding her hands in front of her. In the warm light of the kitchen, the woman’s face appeared younger than it had outside, even though the lines at the corners of her eyes were creased deep with worry and concern.