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“Marvelous. Now come on. You can clean yourself up in the bathroom while I arrange a ticket for you. I don’t know how soon I’ll be able to arrange your departure, but there ought to be something going south before morning comes. I hope. ” The sooner the better, I added to myself. The longer he stayed in the Tennessee Valley, the more trouble he was likely to get himself into.
We went inside together and parted company while I hit the nearest service desk. Malachi slunk out of the restroom a few minutes later,
and I handed him the packet. “The good news is, you’ve only got two hours to stew here. ”
“And the bad?”
“It’s going to take you a while to get home—but it was the best I could do on short notice. I got you as far as Orlando by 6:45 tomorrow night. Here’s fifty bucks. Get a magazine or something when they stop. Maybe a razor, or a fresh T-shirt. You’ll be okay. And I’ll call Harry in the morning”—I glanced at my watch and winced—“well, later on in the morning, and let him know you’re coming. He’ll have to drive down and pick you up, but it’s not that far and it shouldn’t be a problem. ”
“All right. ”
“All right. ” Everything had been said, at least everything pragmatic and utilitarian. He was set. The bus was waiting. But the dead air between us seemed to call for something more, so I stammered on a little. “So…are we good, here?”
“We…? Um, I guess. I’m good, yeah. ” He was disappointed; that much was obvious. But he wasn’t at the bottom of the river or back in the Bend with a lifetime membership, so things could have been much worse. He knew it, but he didn’t pretend to like it.
We stood there awkwardly, trapped in one of those moments where two ordinary people might hug and say proper good-byes. But between the pair of us, all we managed was a halfhearted shoulder swat and wishes of good luck and safe travels. I also extracted, with some difficulty, a promise from Malachi that he would not leave the station until his bus saw fit to collect him.
And he dragged out of me the assurance that yes, I wanted him to call me when he’d arrived safely. But that was all the familial intimacy we were able to conjure up on such short notice. He’d spent half his life trying to kill me, after all. Understanding the misunderstanding doesn’t make everything spontaneously uncomplicated.
I left him then, wandering back to my car and taking another moment to scope the damage. I could hardly stand to look at it. It would have to wait until daylight, which—it occurred to me—was only another couple of hours away. Lu and Dave would arrive later still, and I was glad I had time to work on my story. “A skunk,” I’d told Malachi.
It was as good an alibi as any.
6
The Displaced
Daylight didn’t make my car look any better, but it gave me a better idea of the damage. Like so many aspects of the previous evening, it could have been worse. As Malachi had pointed out, and last night had demonstrated, the Nugget was still drivable. All the damage was cosmetic save the unbalanced headlight, and a few minutes rifling through the garage turned up a funny-shaped screwdriver that corrected that. My informal tweaking might not hold for long, but it would work for the time being.
Harry’s response to my 8:00 A. M. phone call was predictably irate. At some point I actually set the phone down and poured myself some cereal while he raved, and when he finished I tried to smooth things over between bites of Wheaties.
It hadn’t worked as well as I would have liked, but before we hung up I had badgered Harry into a definite maybe as far as coming up for a visit with my wayward brother was concerned. I don’t know if I’d sold him on the idea or not, but I’d held up my end of the bargain and tried.
And now, I had other things to think about.
I had an idea or two I wanted to chase before my aunt and uncle returned from their concert in Georgia, so I headed towards town and made for the library. I was going crazy wondering about the thing I’d seen at the Bend; it reminded me of something I’d seen or read a long time ago. I already knew who and what the thing at the Bend had to be, but I wanted some reinforcement for my theory.
The dead are my children, the long-haired creature had said.
He was a caretaker. A guardian. I remembered the way he’d faced me briefly, and how that eye I’d seen had burned such a catlike shade.
I told the woman at the book desk that I wanted some books on local lore—preferably with ghost stories, or information on Appalachian cryptozoology. I probably should have stopped myself at “ghost stories,” but my unshakable impression that I was dealing with something other than a ghost made me tack on the rest.
The librarian looked at me like I was insane; but I was accustomed to that, so it was easy to ignore.
“Cryptozoology,” I repeated, prepared to explain.
“I know what the word means, sweetheart,” she said. “And we’ve got a section with books like that up on the second floor. I don’t know if you’ll find anything as specific as ‘Appalachian cryptozoology,’ but there are plenty of books that talk about area hauntings. We’ve probably got a whole shelf of stuff dedicated to the Bell Witch alone. ”
“The Bell Witch? She’s not exactly local. ”
“It happened outside of Nashville, and that’s local enough for Chattanooga library classification. ”
The librarian took a scrap of paper and jotted down a few Dewey numbers. “Check around here,” she said as she handed it to me.
I thanked her, took the wide, carpeted stairs up a flight, and checked the rows of books against the scrawled note I held. I glanced down the aisles and saw practically no one; the place was deserted save for the odd homeless person napping in a chair, or the stray library worker shuffling along with a cartload of tomes to be shelved.
I found the row the librarian had indicated and slid between the tall bookcases, tilting my head to the left to read the spines.
