Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

He nodded. “Especially after your sister.”

I looked at him without being obvious about it, then realized I hadn’t taken off my sunglasses yet, just like at the market. It could’ve been you, I thought. No reason to think so, but when a killing is never solved, a body never found, it can’t not cross your mind when you look at some people, the ones with proximity and access and history. The ones you really don’t know anything about anymore. If Ray had known where to find berries, he’d know where to bury a girl.

“Especially then,” I said.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked. “My apologies if I did.”

He sounded sincere, but I’d been hearing sincere for years. Naw, boss, I don’t know who hid that shank in my bunk. Not me, boss, I didn’t have nothing to do with that bag of pruno. They were all sincere down to the rot at their core.

The other C.O.s had warned me early on: There’ll come a time when you look at everybody like they’re guilty of something.

I’d refused to believe this: No, I know how to leave work at work.

Now it was me telling the new C.O.s the same thing.

I took off the shades. “You didn’t say anything wrong. A thing like that, you never really get over it. Time doesn’t heal the wounds, it just thickens up the scars.” I moved to the screen door and looked outside, smelled the autumn day, a golden scent of sun-warmed leaves. “It’s not like it used to be around here, is it.”

He shrugged. “Where is?”

I had him follow me outside, and turned my face to the sun, shutting my eyes and just listening, thinking that it at least sounded the way it had. That expansive, quiet sound of birds and wide-open spaces.

“When I was at the market, I would’ve needed at least two hands to count the people I’d be willing to bet will be dead in five years,” I said. “How’d this get started?”

Ray eyed me hard. I knew it even with my eyes closed. I’d felt it as sure as if he’d poked me with two fingers. When I opened my eyes, he looked exactly like I knew he would.

“You’re some kind of narc now, aren’t you, Dylan?” he said.

“Corrections officer. I don’t put anybody in prison, I just try to keep the peace once they’re there.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth, his gaze on far distances. “Well… the way anything starts, I guess. A little at a time. It’s a space issue, mostly. Space, privacy. We got plenty of both here. And time. Got plenty of that, too.”

His great-uncle hadn’t, not to my recollection. Mr. Tepovich had always had just enough time, barely, to do what needed doing. The same as my grandfather. I wondered where all that time had come from.

“How many meth labs are there around here, I wonder,” I said.

“I couldn’t tell you anything. All I know’s what I hear, and I don’t hear much.”

Can’t help you, boss. I don’t know nothing about that.

“But if you were to get lucky and ask the right person,” Ray went on, “I expect he might tell you something like it was the only thing he was ever good at. The only thing that ever worked out for him.”

The trees murmured, and leaves whisked against the birdhouse gourds.

“He might even take the position that it’s a blessed endeavor.”

I hadn’t expected this. “Blessed by who?”

His hesitation here, his uncertainty, looked like the first genuine expression since we’d started down this path. “Powers that be, I guess. Not government, not those kinds of powers. Something… higher.” He tipped his head back, jammed his big jaw and bristly beard forward, scowling at the sky. “Say there’s a place in the woods, deep, where nobody’s likely to go by accident. Not big, but not well hid, either. Now say there’s a team from the sheriff’s department taking themselves a hike. Fifteen, twenty feet away and they don’t see it. Now say the same thing happens with a group of fellows got on jackets that say ‘DEA.’ They all just walk on by like nothing’s there.”

He was after something, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe Ray didn’t know either. They say if you stick around a prison long enough, you’ll see some strange things that are almost impossible to explain, and even if I hadn’t, I’d heard some stories. Maybe Ray had heard that as well, and was looking for… what, someone who understood?

“I don’t know what else you’d call that,” he said, “other than blessed.”

“For a man who doesn’t hear much, you have some surprising insights.”

His gaze returned to earth and the mask went back on. “Maybe I keep my ear to the ground a little more than I let on.” He began to sidle away toward his aunt’s. “You take care, Dylan. Again, sorry about Evvie.”

“Hey Ray? Silly question, but…” I said. “Your Aunt Polly, your own grandma, your mom, anybody… when you were a kid, did any of them ever tell you stories about something called the Woodwalker?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Seen my share of wood peckers , though.” He got a few more steps away before he stopped again, something seeming to rise up that he hadn’t thought of in twenty years. “Now that you mention it, I remember one from Aunt Pol about what she called Old Hickory Bones. It didn’t make a lot of sense. ‘Tall as the clouds, small as a nut,’ that sort of nonsense. You know old women and their stories.”

“Right.”

He looked like he was piecing together memories from fragments. “The part that scared us most, she’d swear up and down it was true, from when she was a girl. That there was this crew of moonshiners got liquored up on their own supply and let the still fire get out of hand. Burned a few acres of woods, and some crops and a couple of homes with it. Her story went that they were found in a row with their arms and legs all smashed up and run through with hickory sticks… like scarecrows, kind of. And that’s how Old Hickory Bones got his name. I always thought she just meant to scare us into making sure we didn’t forget about our chores.”

“That would do it for me,” I said.

He laughed. “Those cows didn’t have to wait on me for very many morning milkings, I’ll tell you what.” He turned serious, one big hand scrubbing at his beard. “Why do you come to ask about a thing like that?”

I gestured at the house. “You know how it is going through a place this way. Everything you turn over, there’s another memory crawling out from underneath it.”

Later, I kept going back to what I’d said when Gina and I had first walked in and looked at Grandma’s chair: that it seemed like she’d finished her book and set it aside and peacefully resolved it was a good day to die. It’s the kind of invention that gives you comfort, but maybe she really had. She kept up on us, her children and grandchildren, even though we were scattered far and wide. She knew I had a vacation coming up, knew that it overlapped with Gina’s.

And we were her favorites. Even Mrs. Tepovich knew that.

So I’m tempted to think Grandma trusted that, with the right timing, Gina and I would be first to go through the house. She couldn’t have wanted my mother to do it. Couldn’t have wanted my father to be the first up in the attic. Some things are too cruel, no matter how much love underlies them.

Maybe she’d thought we would be more likely to understand and accept. Because we were her favorites, and even though my mother had grown up here, and my aunts and uncles too, they were so much longer out of the woods than we, her grandchildren, were.

It broke the agreeable calm of Saturday afternoon, Gina and I in different parts of the house. I was in the pantry, looking through last season’s preserves and had discovered an ancient Mason jar full of coins when a warbling cry drifted down. I thought she’d come across a dead raccoon, a nest of dried-out squirrels… the kind of things that sometimes turn up in country attics.