Wisp of a Thing

13

When Rob returned to the Catamount Corner, a Tennessee State Trooper’s car was parked next to Terry Kizer’s SUV. As he got out, the young officer appeared from inside and came down the steps toward him. He had the Tufa hair and skin. “Are you Mr. Robert Quillen?” he asked in that flat, emotionless policeman’s way.

Rob’s first thought was that he was being arrested and would be forced back on the TV show. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I’m Trooper Alvin Darwin. I need to talk to you in an official capacity, Mr. Quillen. Might have a missing-persons case on our hands, and you might be a witness.”

“Who’s missing?” Rob asked.

Before Darwin could answer, Terry Kizer came out the front door. “Hey, Rob. You didn’t see Stella while you were out, did you?”

“No.” Rob looked at Darwin. “Is that who’s missing?”

Again, as Darwin started to speak, Kizer jumped in. “She wasn’t in our room when we got back, and she didn’t leave a note or anything. But we found her purse down the street.” He indicated the area around the post office, where Rockhouse sat alone on the porch. The shadow was too deep for Rob to tell if the old man watched them.

“You ask that old guy?” Rob said.

“Mr. Hicks said he hadn’t seen her,” Darwin said. “Said he’d been there all morning.”

“Yeah, his word and a dollar’ll get you a cup of coffee,” Rob said.

“And you haven’t seen her since breakfast?” Darwin asked.

“Nope.”

“And Mr. Kizer was with you immediately after breakfast?”

“For a while. We went gravestone-rubbing. Was she carrying any money?”

Kizer nodded. “Yeah, and it was all there when we found it: traveler’s checks, credit cards, everything. I’m starting to get really worried.”

To Darwin, Rob said, “I’m impressed. I thought you had to wait twenty-four hours to declare someone missing.”

“I need to ask you some more questions,” Darwin said, ignoring Rob’s comment. He gave Kizer a serious be quiet look, then turned back to Rob. “You never know which details turn out to be important. Can we step inside?”

“Sure.”

“So tell me what happened this morning,” Darwin said as he poured himself a cup of coffee in the little dining room. Kizer sat tapping nervously on the tabletop near the window.

“I showed Terry this old graveyard behind the fire station, and he did some rubbings on some of the tombstones. Then we came back here, and I drove out to Doyle Collins’s gas station.”

Darwin looked up sharply. “Behind the fire station? The old Swett family plot?”

“Yeah.”

For an instant, Darwin looked puzzled and angry; then he smiled, once again the friendly good ol’ boy. “How long have you been in town, Mr. Quillen?”

“Two days.”

“And which side are you from?”

“Side of what?”

The trooper’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to see something he hadn’t noticed before. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were Tufa. You look familiar.”

“You’re not the first to think so.”

Darwin turned his attention back to his notebook. “You know about what time you and Mr. Kizer got back?”

“Around eleven thirty.”

Darwin put away the notebook and stirred creamer into his cup. “Mr. Kizer, you have those rubbings handy? Just so I can verify it in my report.”

Kizer looked annoyed. “Shouldn’t we be looking for Stella instead of worrying about that?”

“Every deputy and forest ranger within a hundred miles is doing just that, and if she doesn’t turn up soon, we’ll start calling up volunteers. My job is to figure out when she left and why she went wherever she is.” He looked back at Rob. “So you ever see the two of ’em fight?”

“Hey, I’m right here in the room, you know,” Kizer said.

“No, I never saw them fight,” Rob said. It wasn’t a total lie, since he had only heard them the night before, and the little scene at breakfast couldn’t really be called a “fight.”

“Look, we have ups and downs like anybody,” Kizer said defensively. “If you’re married, you know what I mean.”

“I surely do,” Darwin admitted. “Would you mind getting those rubbings for me? Just so I can be honest when I say I saw ’em.”

Exasperated, Kizer left. When they were alone, Darwin asked Rob, “He seem nervous when you two were out this morning?”

“No,” Rob said truthfully.

“Think he’s violent?”

“No. Do you?”

Darwin shrugged.

“Wasn’t it Terry who called you?” Rob asked.

“True enough. The lady who runs this place saw Mrs. Kizer leave while you guys were gone, but nobody in town saw her after that. It’s like she just walked off into the woods, which seems kind of unlikely. From what he says, she didn’t care much for the rustic life.”

Kizer came back in, looking even more frustrated. “Well, I can’t find them. I thought I put them down in the room, but they’re not there, and they’re not in the truck.”

“No big deal, I’m sure they’ll turn up,” Darwin said. To Rob, he added, “Besides, you can verify his whereabouts, right?”

“Yeah.”

Darwin put a lid on his coffee cup. “Then we won’t keep you, Mr. Quillen. Mr. Kizer, y’all better come with me. We’ll drive around and see if we can spot your wife.”

Kizer followed Darwin out. Peggy Goins appeared, shaking her head as she gathered up the empty creamer package and swizzle stick. “That poor man. I can’t believe his wife would just run off on him like that. Sure, he’s a little overweight, but he’s so nice.”

“Sometimes nice doesn’t count for much,” Rob said. He watched through the window as Kizer and Darwin drove away.

“That’s true,” Peggy agreed. “Will you be wanting some lunch?”

“Hm? No, I think I’m going to go up to my room and lie down for a while. I bumped my head again this morning, and I’ve got a headache.”

She patted his arm. “You rest, then. I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”

“I can’t imagine who in this town would want to bother me, but thank you.”

Peggy went onto the porch. Deputy Darwin and Terry Kizer were gone, and the rest of the street was deserted except for Rockhouse on the post office porch. She lit a cigarette and leaned on the rail, letting the sun fall on her face.

Across the street, young Lassa Gwinn stepped out of the Fast Grab convenience store where she worked. She was as round as her big sister, Tiffany, but on a much smaller scale, and radiated kindness. “What’s going on with the poe-leece?” she called. “Somebody in trouble?”

“Fella done lost his wife,” Peggy answered. “Turned his back on her, and off she went.”

“Tall redheaded thing?”

“That’s her.”

“I seen her come out this morning. She was down talking to Rockhouse before.”

“That ain’t what he told the deputy.”

Lassa snorted. “That a surprise? Saw Stoney down there, too.”

Peggy felt claws of ice dig into her heart. “No you did not.”

Lassa nodded. “I sure did.”

“Was Stoney talking to the girl?”

“Didn’t see that. But if a pretty girl disappears within a hundred yards of Stoney Hicks, what do you think? Ain’t the first one, won’t be the last.” Then she went back into her store.

Peggy looked down the street at Rockhouse, and the urge to smack a shovel against his smug skull had never been stronger. Peggy took the final drag from her cigarette and tossed the butt into the street as she went back inside.

The school bus stopped at the end of the dirt driveway leading to the trailer. It was a single-wide, and there was a swing set beside it where Bliss Overbay sat waiting.

A lone ten-year-old girl got off the bus and waved at her friends. As the bus drove away, she trudged along the grass strip running down the driveway’s center. She had her head down, and she hummed to herself.

Without looking up, she said, “Hey, Bliss.”

“Hey, Mandalay. Got a minute?”

“Lots of math homework.”

“It won’t take long.”

The girl shrugged. “Okay.” She dropped her backpack on the cinder block steps and took a seat in the swing next to Bliss.

Although she was only a child, Mandalay Harris was the head of the Tufa First Daughters, and Rockhouse Hicks’s equal and opposite. Time and memory worked very differently for the Tufa, especially the full-blooded ones, and Mandalay understood that more than any of them. Bliss often wished she could gaze into those dark, enigmatic eyes for hours, searching for the secrets the girl possessed, secrets older than the mountains around them. But for now, Mandalay walked the world as a ten-year-old girl, and Bliss operated as her eyes, voice, hands, and occasionally, fists.

“There’s somebody in town who shouldn’t be,” Bliss said. “He looks like one of us, but he’s not. There’s not a drop of the true in him. I know it, Peggy knows it. You’d know it if you spent five minutes with him.”

Mandalay kicked at the dirt with her Sleeping Beauty tennis shoes. “I already know it.”

“But here’s the thing. He found the Swett graveyard. He saw the inscriptions.”

Mandalay frowned as she swung. “That ain’t right, is it?”

“I don’t know,” Bliss said honestly. “But remember how you told me to watch for a sign last night? I accidentally dropped two guitar picks in the water, and the wind blew them together.”

“He knows the music?” Mandalay asked.

“He’s a musician, yes. And he knows the verses on the Swett stones are from a song.”

“Then you have to go play with him.”

“But—”

“The sign’s pretty clear. The night winds want you two together. You fight them, they can make it a lot worse than a suggestion.”

She remembered the surge of unwanted desire when she first saw Rob at the Pair-A-Dice. Had that been the winds, making sure she noticed him? “Why, Mandalay? Why him? Why me?”

Mandalay looked up at the sky, squinting her eyes against the sun. “Why him, I don’t know yet. But why you… because you’re the closest thing to what they want that the night winds can reach.”

“Closest to what?” Bliss said, thoroughly confused. “You?”

“No, not me.” Mandalay looked at her with that patient, vaguely superior air she got when something was obvious to her but to no one else. The soul behind her eyes did not belong to a ten-year-old girl.

Then Bliss got it. “Oh, shit.”

Mandalay nodded. “Her time’s running out. This season will be her last. When the final leaf falls from the Widow’s Tree this year, she’ll be lost for good. Lost to memory, lost to time. Lost to the winds.”

Bliss could barely breathe.

“I don’t know what the night winds want yet. And if I don’t, Rockhouse don’t. But he’s got a bigger stake in this than I do because he started it. It’s in his best interest to finish it once and for all.”

“So is Rob here to help him, or—?”

Mandalay shrugged her little shoulders.

“That’s not fair,” Bliss said.

“I ain’t arguing that. But it’s what’s coming.”

“Does she know?”

“I don’t know if she even knows her name after all this time. She’s just a wisp of a thing now.” The girl began to swing higher.

“No,” Bliss insisted. “No, she’s not. Not yet.”

Mandalay jumped out of the swing and landed at the edge of the grass. “That’s all I can tell you. It’s all I know. I’m going inside now, I want to finish up my homework before iCarly.”

Bliss made a hand gesture that conveyed respect, obedience, and affection. Mandalay returned it, started to walk away, then stopped.

“I don’t know this for sure,” the girl said carefully, “but we’ve always been able to have babies with human people. So we can’t be that different from them, right?”

“Oh, we’re different,” Bliss insisted.

“No, that ain’t what I mean. Cut us, we bleed red. Tickle us, we laugh hard. Whack us in the head, we get dizzy.”

“I don’t follow.”

She smiled. The knowledge and maturity behind the smile, coming as they did from the face of a child, were terrifying. “You will. It’s right in front of you.” Then she went inside.

Bliss sat on the swing for a long time, watching her feet drag through the dirt as she slowly moved back and forth.

Exhausted, his head pounding, Rob fell asleep almost immediately. His mind dived straight into dreams.

He was alone, on a high spot that overlooked the valley. Here the great hills seemed different, sharper and edgier, as if they hadn’t yet achieved their lyrical, rolling quality. Birds swooped through the skies, but they weren’t buzzards or crows. They were immense and black, like ravens on steroids, and looked capable of snatching small children. In the distance, a single tree rose higher than the others.

Behind him, he saw a picnic table in a clearing, and beyond it a tree with a huge ball deformity in the trunk. An emu walked across the clearing, oblivious of him, and disappeared back into the forest. Then Rob saw an old man perched on one of the deformed tree’s large root knobs. He had a pipe in his teeth, jet-black hair, and wore overalls and old-style workboots.

And he was, at most, three feet tall.

Rob approached this perfectly scaled miniature old man. In dream-logic, this didn’t seem strange. “Hi,” he said.

“Howdy,” the old man replied.

“My name’s Rob. Who’re you?”

He tapped the root with the stem of his pipe. “You can call me Jessup. I’m the tree.”

“You’re the tree.”

“Sure. Just like them.”

He waved his pipe to indicate the woods around three sides of the clearing. When Rob looked again, he saw that each tree had a small person seated on it, near it, or in it. They were as varied as any group of normal people, men and women wearing jackets and jeans and T-shirts. They weren’t moving around or speaking, and they didn’t seem concerned with him, either.

Rob looked back at the little man. “You’re all trees?”

“Sure.” Wincing, the old man pulled off one of his boots and propped his painfully swollen foot on another nearby root. “’Scuse me while I git comf’table.”

Rob turned, and now Bliss sat at the picnic table, her chin in her hands. She was dressed as she’d been at the Pair-A-Dice.

“Are you the picnic table?” he asked.

She smiled. Her teeth were even, and white, and now shaped into little triangles, like shark’s teeth. “No, I’m just me. The real me.” Something rustled behind her, and he thought he caught a glimpse of shimmering, diaphanous, tightly folded wings.

Something leaped onto the table, and Rob jumped back, startled. The movement and color were identical to the mysterious shape that caused him to run off the road.

It was a teenage girl, with a halo of short, dark, and ragged hair around her face. She had enormous eyes, and she huddled behind Bliss, peering over the woman’s shoulder. She wore a tattered orange dress, and her skin was dark from both sun and dirt.

Bliss turned very serious. “This is Curnen. She’s my baby sister.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rob said. In dream-memory, he vaguely recalled that he’d heard the name before.

“Be nice, Curnen, and say hi,” Bliss lightly scolded.

The girl rose so that Rob saw her whole face. It was small, and gentle, with full lips on a tiny mouth. Little bits of spittle formed at the corners.

“She doesn’t have long before she’s lost for good,” Bliss said. “She wanted to meet you. That makes you special.”

Suddenly Curnen leaped over Bliss, nimble as a monkey, and hit Rob hard. She wrapped her arms and legs around his upper body and they fell together to the ground.

Curnen crushed her lips against his, like someone who’d only seen other people kiss, and he was too startled to react. He hit the back of his head painfully, right on his injury—

And snapped awake in his bed, the girl hunched over him, her lips pressed to his.