Dark Mountain Page 8

  “Get out!”

  He sighed. “Yes, ma’am.” He stood in the waist-deep water and waded ashore, both hands cupped over his groin.

  “You haven’t got no sense at all, boy.”

  “The Master, He—”

  “Don’t you go laying it on the Master! Weren’t nothing but your pecker wanted those girls. Bend over.”

  “Ettie, please.”

  “Do what I say.” He bent over, and she swung the fishing pole hard against his rump. Crying out, he clutched his buttocks. “Move your hands.” He was sobbing. As his hands dropped away, Ettie saw a red stripe across his skin. Her throat constricted, and Merle went blurry as tears filled her eyes. She drew back the switch to strike again, but instead of swinging, she threw it down. “Go on and get dressed,” she said in a shaky voice. “And don’t you ever do nothing like that again, or you’ll be the sorriest man that ever walked on two legs.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ettie walked away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Hey, look!” Julie’s arm swung up, and she pointed.

  Nick gazed up the shadowy trail. Off to the side, he saw a small cleared area between two trees. It was a patch of raised ground, roughly rectangular, enclosed by a border of small stones. A weathered plank of wood tilted from the earth at its far end.

  “A grave,” Julie whispered.

  “Naw.”

  “Sure looks like one.”

  Leaning into the straps of his heavy pack, Nick hurried toward the mound. Julie stayed close to his side. He was nervous and excited, as if they were the first ever to discover this forbidden site. He stopped at its foot. The hump of ground was roughly the size of a small man. Words had been carved into the wooden marker. His eyes followed them as Julie read aloud in a hushed voice: “‘Beneath this earth lies Digby Bolles. Poor man ran out of Dr. Scholl’s.’”

  Nick felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. “It’s a joke,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Somebody went to a lot of trouble for a practical joke.”

  “Some people do,” Julie said, and gave him an amused look. “Doreeeen,” she called softly. “Audreeee.”

  Nick nodded. He thought of their brief, wild run behind the tents, the screams of the twins, how daring he’d felt through the whole experience. Running in only his T-shirt and shorts, Julie close to him in the dark. The way he’d wanted to grab her and pull her tight against him, and kiss her.

  “We’ll have to do that again sometime,” she said.

  “We’d catch hell,” he told her. “I wouldn’t mind, though.”

  “Whatcha got there?” Dad called from behind. He was trudging up the trail with Mom at his side. The girls were a short distance back.

  “A grave,” Julie said.

  “No kidding? Not a real grave?”

  “Have a look,” Nick said. He and Julie stepped aside to make room for them.

  “Holy Toledo,” Dad said.

  “Who is it?” asked Rose, pushing forward.

  “A poor guy named Digby Bolles.”

  Mom read the epitaph aloud.

  Heather wrinkled her nose. “Who’s Dr. Scholl?”

  “It’s not a who. It’s a brand of foot powder.”

  “And the guy died when he ran out?”

  “No, honey. It’s just a joke. Nobody’s buried here.”

  “We oughta get a snapshot of this,” Dad said. He swung down his pack. While he opened a side pocket, Rose and Heather stared at the plot of ground.

  “Someone’s there, all right,” Rose said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “A grave,” Benny gasped, arriving out of breath.

  “Mom says it’s not really,” Heather told him.

  He frowned as he read the inscription. Then he grinned. “Hey, that’s neat.”

  “I better use the flash,” Dad said. “All these shadows. Want to make sure the saying comes out.” Everyone moved out of his way. He crouched at the foot of the mound. The flash cube made a quick burst of silvery light.

  “What’s all the excitement?” Scott asked. He was striding up the trail, Karen close beside him.

  “It’s Digby’s grave,” Benny explained.

  They walked over to it. Karen read the verse aloud, and laughed softly. “That’s a shame.”

  “He should’ve been more careful,” Scott said.

  Benny looked up at him. “What do you think’s down there?”

  “Digby Bolles.”

  “I mean really.”

  Julie glanced at Nick. Her eyebrows went up and down. She turned to her father. “What-say we dig it up and find out?”

  “What-say we don’t?”

  “Come on, aren’t you curious?”

  Half grinning, he said, “Noooo.”

  “What about you, Karen?”

  “I think we should let him rest in peace.”

  “Now, let’s stop all this talk,” Mom said. “It’s scaring the girls. We all know there’s nobody buried here.”

  “Yes, there is,” Rose told her.

  “See what I mean? It’s just somebody’s rotten idea of a joke.”

  “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” Dad said. “I say we haul ass.”

  “Arnold!”

  “Why don’t you guys go on ahead?” Julie suggested. “I’ll catch up later.”

  “Julie…”

  “Why not? What’ll it hurt? I’ll put everything back just the way it is.”

  “What are you hoping to find?” Scott asked.

  She smiled mysteriously. “Answers.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom muttered. “Nothing’s there.”

  Dad was smiling, obviously pulling for Julie. “Wouldn’t hurt to know for sure, though.”

  “Arnold!”

  “I’ll stay and help,” Nick said.

  “This is absurd,” his mother muttered.

  “Hell, let ’em satisfy their curiosity, Alice. You said yourself they won’t find anything.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “They won’t. But if they want to waste their time and energy, far be it from me to stand in their way.”

  “Atta girl.”

  She gave him a quick, humorless smile.

  “Don’t stay too long, kids,” Dad said.

  “We’ll catch up as soon as we can.”

  Heather gazed at Nick with wide, frightened eyes. “You gonna dig it up?”

  “Probably nothing there but an old shoe,” he told her.

  Rose narrowed her eyes. “You’ll be sorry,” she said in a singsong.

  Both girls turned away and hurried to catch up with their mother and father.

  “You want to stay?” Scott asked Benny.

  The boy made a face as if he’d been invited to taste a worm. “I don’t want to see any stiffs,” he proclaimed.

  “I don’t blame you,” Karen said.

  Scott turned to her. “Shall we be off and leave Burke and Hare to their grisly chore?”

  “I’m with you.”

  The three of them started up the trail, leaving Nick and Julie by the grave. “Mission accomplished,” Julie said. Nick grabbed her pack while she slipped her arms out of the straps. “Thank you, sir,” she said, then took it from him and set it down. He swung his own pack to the ground. “I’ve got a little shovel in here someplace,” she told him, propping her pack against his. Crouching, she slid a plastic clamp down its tie cord and peeled back the cover.

  Nick stepped behind Julie as she rummaged inside. Her T-shirt clung to her back with sweat. The tint of her skin was visible through the fabric. So was the narrow white crossband of her bra, and the thin straps running up to her shoulders. He could see the bumps of her spine pushing out the material and remembered the way her nipples had shown last night. Hey, you can look at me all you want. I was looking at you.

  “Here we go.” She stood up, a green plastic trowel in her hand.

  “Perf
ect,” Nick said.

  They stepped over to the mound. “Where’ll we dig?”

  “In the middle?”

  “Good a place as any.” She smiled, looking a bit nervous, and knelt beside the border of stones. Nick stepped around her, and dropped to his knees. Her shoulder brushed against him as she reached out with the trowel. Using its edge, she scraped away a layer of pine needles to expose a patch of earth. With its point, she scratched out a pair of crossing lines. “X marks the spot,” she whispered. She pushed the plastic blade into the soil, and hesitated. “You don’t…you don’t really think anyone’s down there, do you?”

  “Naw.”

  “Me either.” She pried out a heap of dirt, and dumped it next to the small hole. “I mean, who’d bury someone out here?”

  “I don’t know.” Nick’s mouth was dry. His heart beat fast. He didn’t know whether he felt so tense because of the grave or because Julie was so close to him.

  “What if we do find a body?” she asked, frowning at the tiny hole.

  “It’s unlikely.”

  “It’s possible, though.” She turned her face toward him. Her eyes were so blue that even the white seemed to have a faint bluish color. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her tongue curled out from a corner of her mouth and caught a trickle of sweat. “It is possible,” she said.

  Nick felt breathless. “Yeah,” he managed.

  “Oh, what the hell.” Her face turned away, and she reached out with the trowel. Its tip hovered above the hole, quivering slightly. She sighed. “You know, I’m not sure this is such a hot idea after all.”

  “We don’t have to do it,” Nick told her.

  “We said we would.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “They’ll say we chickened out. Not that I give a rat’s ass what anybody says, but…I don’t know, if there’s a real-live actual corpse—”

  “A live corpse?”

  “Okay, a dead one. It’d be sacrilegious to mess around with it.”

  “Not to mention gross.”

  She laughed softly. “Yeah, that too.” She looked at him again. Her eyebrows lifted. “What do you think?”

  “Let’s forget it.”

  She shook her head a bit. “This is really weird. I mean, we both know there’s nobody under here. So what’re we afraid of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With the edge of her trowel, she brushed the small pile of soil back into the hole. She patted it down. “There you go, Digby. Rest in peace.”

  They stood up. Julie brushed dirt and pine needles off her knees. “I guess that’s that,” she said.

  “Guess so.”

  They returned to their packs. Nick watched her crouch down to put away the trowel and close her pack. Like before, he stared at the way her T-shirt clung to her back.

  I’m a chicken, all right, he thought. If I weren’t a damn chicken, I would’ve kissed her.

  Do it now.

  No. I can’t. I just can’t.

  “That’s quite a scar you’ve got there,” Flash said, taking a trail cookie from the bag in Karen’s hand. The scar was a pale horse shoe on her forearm. “How’d you pick it up?”

  “A car accident,” she said. She looked away quickly, and offered a cookie to Benny, who was sitting at the other end of the fallen trunk. “Want to pass them around?”

  Benny took the bag. “Was it a bad accident?” he asked.

  “Very bad,” she said.

  Benny got up from the log, and gave cookies to the others sitting on the ground against their packs. There was an uneasy silence. Flash bit into his cookie and chewed. Obviously, he shouldn’t have mentioned Karen’s scar. “I’ve got a couple of doozies myself,” he said. He started to tug his shirt out of his pants.

  “Arnold,” Alice said in her warning voice.

  Ignoring her, he pulled up his shirt. He stood up and turned so Karen and Benny could see the small puffy crater in the flesh just above his hip. Karen wrinkled up her nose. Benny looked impressed. “That’s from an AK-47 bullet I caught in ’Nam.” He turned around. “See there? That’s the exit wound.”

  “How’d it happen?” Benny asked.

  “Well, your dad and I were on a strafing run when I caught a SAM. A surface-to-air missile. Knocked me right out of the sky. I hit the silk—ejected, you know—and found myself behind enemy lines.” His head suddenly felt light. He let his shirt fall, and took deep breaths, fighting the dizziness. “Anyway, I spent nine days alone in the jungle…working my way south, dodging pa—” He blinked. Benny’s silhouette was surrounded by a brilliant blue-silver halo. Shit, he thought, I’m gonna…He staggered backward, sat down heavily on the log, and lowered his head between his knees.

  “Are you all right, honey?” he heard through the loud ringing in his ears. Alice. “I knew he shouldn’t get started on that. He tries to put on that it was a big adventure, but—”

  “Stop,” he mumbled.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  He felt a hand on his back. “Here.” Scott. “Drink some water.”

  Flash nodded. The ringing faded. He raised his head, and blinked. His vision seemed okay again. The girls, beside Alice, were staring at him with wide eyes. Alice was frowning. “Just a little dizzy spell,” he said. “Probably the altitude.” He took the canteen from Scott, nodded his thanks, and drank a few swallows of cold water.

  “Maybe you’d better lie down,” Alice suggested.

  “I’m fine. Think I’ll just…” He gave the canteen back to Scott and stood up. He still felt shaky, but the dizziness was gone. Walking carefully, he made his way to the shore of the lake. He stepped out on some low, flat rocks. Crouching, he dipped his hands into the chilly water and splashed his face.

  Damn, but he’d made a fool out of himself back there. Should’ve known better.

  He heard the crunch of footsteps behind him. Scott stood on a rock to his left. “You okay?”

  “Shit.”

  “What was it, the sweats?”

  “Yeah. Happens now and again. Shit, you’d think fifteen goddamn years’d be enough to get over it. The damn thing’s fucked up my whole life.”

  Scott tossed a pebble into the water. It made a soft plip. “I guess none of us got out of it unscathed. I have plenty of bad times myself, and I wasn’t even shot down.”

  “God, I used to love to fly.”

  “You were one of the best.”

  “I’d probably be a captain, now, like you, if…You know what really gets me? It’s all in my head. All in my fucked-up head, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Like there’s some damn stranger inside here.” He tapped his fingertips against his temple. “Just hiding in here, scared shitless, and every once in a while he has to pop up and let me know he’s still at the controls.” Flash forced a smile. “Could’ve been worse. I’d been a grunt, I might be scared to walk.”

  Scott smiled. “Always a bright side.”

  They stood up, and turned away from the shining lake. As they walked back toward the others, Flash saw Nick and Julie coming up the trail. “Dig him up?” he called out.

  “Sure did,” Nick said.

  “Boy, was he a mess!” Julie added.

  Flash sat down on the log and watched the two approaching. Nick’s hand was out, closed as if he were holding something.

  “He was all dismembered,” Nick said.

  “What?” Karen asked, looking stunned.

  “All cut up in little pieces.”

  “That’s not amusing,” Alice said.

  Nick and Julie smiled as if it were. Nick stepped in front of the twins, who were resting against their packs with their legs outstretched. “I brought you girls a souvenir,” he said. “One of Digby’s fingers.”

  “Nick!” Alice snapped.

  “Catch, Rose.” He made an underhand toss. His sister shrieked as a finger-sized object fell on her lap. Julie cracked up.

  “Nick!”

  “You c
reep!” Rose yelled, and hurled the stub of wood back at him.

  Heather started to laugh. Everyone laughed except Rose and Alice. “Really juvenile,” Alice said, scowling.

  “So,” Flash said, “what did you really find?”

  “Nothing,” Nick told him. “We decided to leave the thing alone.”

  “Poor Digby’s been through enough,” Julie explained.

  “You didn’t find out what’s buried there?”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” Nick said.

  Julie nodded. “One of life’s unsolved mysteries.”

  Flash looked at Scott and shook his head. “Our kids, I’m afraid, are a couple of chickens.”

  Scott grinned at him. “As my pappy used to say, ‘Better a chicken than a ghoul.’”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Must we?” Alice complained. “Why don’t we play cards instead? Do you play bridge, Karen?”

  “Not very well, I’m afraid.”

  “I want a story,” Rose protested.

  “Me, too,” said Heather.

  “You girls were frightened out of your wits last night.”

  “It was neat.”

  “Too windy for cards,” Arnold said. He broke a dead branch over his knee, and placed both pieces on the fire. “I’m for a story.”

  Alice sighed. She didn’t want to be a stick in the mud. On the other hand, she certainly didn’t want a repeat of last night’s shenanigans. The story itself hadn’t bothered her. Not much anyway. But her idea of fun did not include being startled from a half sleep by the hysterical screams of her daughters. “It’s all right with me,” she said. She stared across the blazing fire at Nick. “No funny stuff to night. Promise?”

  “Cross my heart,” he said.

  “Who’s got a story?” Scott asked.

  “A real scary one,” Benny added.

  “Karen?” Arnold asked.

  “Someone else’s turn. I did my damage.”

  At least she had the good sense to realize she’d caused all the trouble.

  Scott leaned toward the fire, grinning. “There is, of course, the true story of Digby Bolles.”

  “Oh, Dad.” Julie smirked at him.

  “Go on,” Alice urged. This story should be harmless enough.

  “Is it scary?” Benny asked.

  “Listen and find out. Digby came to the mountains, insane with grief, to look for his missing daughter, Doreen.”