Ed Gorman: Voodoo Moon

"I think she just wants to check the tape, make sure it's all right. Then she'll bring your trunk back and you can go."

"How'll you get back?"

"Our friend Robert here'll give us a ride."

"Five bucks," I said.

"A comedian," she said.

"What about the videotape?"

"Oh, she'll keep that."

"Won't she want to edit it?"

"Yes, but we'll do that back in Chicago."

"Oh." He looked at me and then at her. "And she really won't say nothing to Cal?"

"I'll see to it," she said again.

The trunk weighed seventy pounds. I found out the hard way. I went up to give Laura a hand. The cameraman was by now duly afraid of her. He sat in the van. He was packed up. He had some heavy-metal station on. He could go when I shoved the trunk in the back. I hefted the trunk by the handles. He made no offer to help.

As we were coming downhill, she said, "I'm going to call his boss and tell him what a moron that kid is."

"No, you're not."

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"The kid's getting married. I told you that already."

"So?"

"And if he loses his job, he'll have to go back to Best Buy."

"That's not exactly my problem, Robert. He's incompetent."

"You get what you pay for. Your company didn't want to spring for a Chicago outfit so you hired some small company out here. They do a lot of cornball commercials and probably even a wedding or two when things get really thin. That's what I mean. You get what you pay for."

"You should've been a priest."

I laughed. "I'm holding out for pope."

"The kid's an idiot."

"Well, if he is, we'll let his boss find that out for himself."

The kid got out of there as fast as he could. As he ground the stick shift into reverse, he rolled down the window and said to me, "Remember what you promised. You know, about Cal."

I nodded. He backed up all the way to the blacktop road. He kept the heavy metal up good and loud. Now, there was something worth bitching to Cal about-the kid's taste in music.

Tandy had walked back up to the ruins. She looked frail against the chimney. There was a sense of isolation up here. The burned-out asylum made the isolation ominous.

"She doesn't usually do stuff like this, does she?"

"What 'stuff' are you talking about?" Laura said.

"Seeing if someone is possessed."

"She sees it all of a piece, the whole thing. As Dr. Rhine at Duke always insisted, paranormal powers tend to come in clusters. People gifted with clairvoyance also seem to have the facility for other forms of ESP. You have a problem with that?"

"I asked a civil question."

"No, you didn't. You asked a cynical, snotty one. That's one of the reasons I don't want you around. Your skepticism gets in the way. And she doesn't need any more skepticism at this stage of her life."

"She doesn't need any people exploiting her, either."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

The breeze was stronger now and muffled the sound so that it didn't register true.

The second sound that came right on top of the first was unmistakable. "Hit the ground!" I shouted up to Tandy.

"God," Laura said, "what's going on?"

"Gunshots."

I took off running the long way up the hill and around the far side of the asylum. Since I'm a reasonably faithful jogger, the run was easy. The hard part was dodging the two shots that were directed at me, the second of them pinging off a small pile of native stone and stirring up a whirl of dust.

Hitting the ground so fast and hard shocked my bones. It took me half a minute to adjust to the impact. The sunburnt grass smelled dusty. Hard nuggets of animal feces were almost decorative. A 7UP bottle cap glistened in the sunlight.

The ruins and the surrounding forest-where the shots had come from-were silent. So were all the humans.

I listened to the wind. The Mesquakie, Iowa's indigenous people, believe that the wind speaks to those who know how to listen. But if the wind was speaking, it was whispering. It gave me neither information nor solace.

I don't know how long I lay on the ground. Enough to feel the dampness just beneath the surface of the soil from a recent rain. The crow started up, that lacerating caw that is somehow half joyous and half mournful. Druids believed that crows were divine messengers.

I got to my feet.

No gunshots.

I started around the back of the asylum.

Tandy had managed to crawl inside the foundation and hide behind a line of broken concrete, only inches from the lip of the hole which was filled with debris from the fire.

She said, "God, those were gunshots, weren't they?"

"They certainly were."

"I can't believe it. Who'd want to shoot me?"

I held out my hand and helped her over the rubble. "That's something we'd better find out."

Laura joined us, breathless from her run up the hill. "Oh, Lord, hon, are you all right?"

She grabbed Tandy and held her tight, the irony being that she seemed far more upset than Tandy did. Perhaps she was holding herself by proxy.

"Those were really gunshots," she said. She tenderly stroked the back of Tandy's head. "I just don't understand why anybody'd want to hurt you."

I said, "Maybe they didn't."

They both looked at me.

"There's the possibility that this was just random."

"Random meaning what?" Laura said.

I shrugged. "Two high school kids with a rifle out hunting and deciding to have a little fun."

"Not even knowing who Tandy is?" Laura said.

"Right."

"You really think so, Robert?" Tandy said.

"Not really. But it's a possibility that can't be ruled out. Sometimes, there really are simple explanations for things."

Laura looked around at the forest to the west of us. "I was going to go for a walk in there when we wound things up here. I used to love to walk in woods when we were little girls. Remember?"

"I used to leave bread crumbs on the trail," Tandy said. "I was very taken with 'Hansel and Gretel.'"

"Now it looks scary," Laura said. "No woodsy walk for Laura today."

"Or Tandy."

"I'll have to take a little stroll," I said.

"Really?" Tandy said.

"Yeah. See if I can find anything. First, I want to walk around up on the hill."

"How come?"

"Look for shell casings." Then, "Either of you know anything about guns?"

"Laura does a little bit," Tandy said.

"Dad gave me some lessons when I was a teenager. Tandy always hated guns."

"You two go down to my car and lock yourselves in. There's a police special thirty-eight in the glove compartment if you need it. Think you can handle it?"

Laura nodded. "One of the guns Dad taught me on was a Smith amp; Wesson thirty-eight."

"Then you won't have any trouble."

"You want us to go with you?"

I shook my head. "Faster if I go alone. If I'm not back in half an hour, use my cell phone and call the local law."

"God, Robert, you sure you want to do this?" Tandy said. She sounded young and fresh again. The old Tandy. Not the celebrity Tandy.

Nice to see you back , I wanted to say. "I'll be fine."

Two towering, gnarled bur oaks formed an entrance to the woods. A broad, sandy path wound through sections of golden maples and sycamore, then hackberry and elm. The land on either side of the path was busy with squirrels and foxes and rabbits and tangled up in shrub stratum that ran from gooseberry to viburnum to dogwood, brightened with coralberry and hazelnut. Gray prehistoric bedrock could be seen beneath its cover of autumn-rotted vegetation, lichen-like beards of growth that had likely first appeared soon after the Ice Age. The forest smelled of birth and death and a baffling ten million years of history. An angled beam of sunlight streamed down through the canopy of leaves above me. It was so lovely and powerful and mythic, I wondered if it might beam me up to heaven, if you'll forgive me mixing Star Trek with Christianity.