I was happy for the backup. “No, it isn’t. It’s beautifully logical, and if it’s right, then we may have all the answers we need right here.”
“Again, I think you’re reaching.”
“Maybe she’s right,” Benny chimed in, but his loyalties were divided, and his enthusiasm wasn’t high.
“Sure she’s right. I am reaching. But come on. The ghosts were talking about a bargain, and about Dyer’s field, and about a Boynton. My math isn’t always spectacular, but I can put two and two together without any trouble, and right now I’m seeing four splashed all over the local news.”
No one spoke until Dana looked up from the screen, clicking the audio player closed. “You think that kid is buried there. At Dyer’s field.”
“Well. Yeah. Yeah, I do. Can anybody think of a better hypothesis? Come on. Anybody?”
I didn’t get an answer until Jamie put the kitten down. “But even if it’s true, it’s not like there’s anything we can do about it.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Benny asked, but Dana put a calming hand on his arm.
“Your friend’s right. What are we going to do, go to the police?”
“Fuck yeah, we’re going to the police!” he swore, but Jamie shook his head.
“And tell them what? We think there’s a chance there’s a dead body out there? On the battlefield? Good luck with that, man. Even if they believe us—and there’s no good reason that they should—they aren’t going to do much about it.”
“No way,” I bickered at him. “How could they not check into a tip like this? What are you talking about?”
Dana stepped in. “It’s federally protected land. Can you imagine what the jurisdiction issues would be like? God only knows what paperwork hoops they’d have to jump through in order to excavate a grave there—even a new one. It’s a stroke of genius to put a murder victim there, if in fact this is what’s happened.”
I was paralyzed by the infuriating truth of it all. “Damn, you’re right. It’d be pulling teeth to get cops to go and check it out, even to see if we’re right and there’s a fresh grave at the cabin.”
“And if we go and dig there, they’ll arrest us.”
“Or worse,” Jamie said, though he didn’t clarify the sentiment. “At this point, I think the best thing we can do for the case is to stay away from the park. There’s nothing we can tell anyone that they’ll take seriously. It makes for hip media coverage, but it’s shit for investigating.”
“Hip media coverage,” I parroted. “That gives me an idea. Hang on a minute, will you?”
I excused myself and stepped outside, digging my cell phone out of my bag with one hand, and fishing for Nick Alders’s business card with my other. I got his voicemail. I left him a message. I was vague but direct, hinting for all I was worth. I hung up.
Maybe he’d follow up, and maybe he wouldn’t; but if nothing else I’d pointed someone unscrupulous and yet credible at my hunch. I hoped it would work, even as I knew it might not. If I was lucky, he’d follow up on it and draw attention to it with local law enforcement. If I wasn’t, he’d ignore me.
But I was betting he’d at least look into it.
When I went back inside, Benny had stolen my seat and Jamie was leaning against the wall with his arms folded.
Dana had picked up the thread I’d dropped when I left, and was kneading something more out of it. “What about this, then?” she asked, putting her hands out like she was about to tell us a story. “There are the Boyntons, whoever they are, and there’s a bargain. Let’s connect the dots, shall we? Let’s say the bargain was with the Boyntons. So how about this: We’ve heard there was some kind of bargain made between the old general and the old monster. You yourself called Green Eyes a guardian and not a ghost. He’s not a spirit; he’s something else. And if he’s protecting the place as part of an arrangement, who else would he have made the arrangement with?”
The room went silent again, and I said what the rest of us were probably thinking. “Keep talking. I’m listening.”
“Well, what could be more pragmatic and dramatic than something like this? By the time the park was established, the Trail of Tears had happened decades before, so it’s not like the native population was keeping the ghoul tied to the land.”
“He might have been on his way out,” I added. “He was going to follow them. But something made him stay.”
Benny leaned his toe up against FrankenHal’s power switch, and the machine dragged itself into darkness. “He must not have been all that resolved to leave, then.”
I was willing to grant him that one. “I don’t think he was. I saw him, remember? And he was talking to himself, more like arguing with himself. I don’t think he ever really wanted to leave in the first place, but he didn’t know what else to do once the Indians left.”
“But you think someone gave him an excuse to stick around?” Jamie uncrossed his arms. “You think that’s what this is about? We’ve got the world’s most ambivalent supernatural freak on our hands?”
“I don’t think ‘ambivalent’ is the right call. It’d be more accurate to call him ‘unmotivated.’” I thought again to his hand-wringing mumbling, and his worrying, back-and-forth grumbles. “For all we know, he was never tied to the Cherokees, and like Karl said, he was connected to the land and not whoever lived there. They were here for a long time, and he got used to them, but things were changing. Everything was changing—the battlefield grounds had become farmland, and there were all these European settlers there.”
Dana waved a pencil she’d picked up from Benny’s desk. “He was disoriented. Confused. Didn’t know whether to stay or go.”
“But he’d stayed in the first place,” I mentioned. “He stayed when they left, so he must not be bound to them very tightly. Again we come back to him being tied to the place, and not the population.”
It was Jamie’s turn. “But as the place changed, he was less sure he needed to stick around.”
No one dared voice the next piece. No one except Dana. “Until someone gave him an excuse. Someone gave him a reason to stay where he wanted to be anyway. That’s the obvious answer, isn’t it?” She pulled her toes away from the kitten, who had abandoned Jamie to wander the floor.
Benny collected the tiny cat in his arms. “It’s a good working theory. It fits all the facts, doesn’t it? A modern-day Boynton disappears, or maybe dies, Green Eyes leaves, and the ghosts are agitated because there’s no one left to keep an eye on the place. But why would they care if he came or went? They’re dead.”
I felt a momentary blitz of memory, thinking of Dana and the words she had given to the dead Confederate. “They have no wings to the kingdom, he said—the soldier at the battlefield. Maybe they’ve stayed behind because they have to. I don’t know. I haven’t a clue how the afterlife works.”
Dana rose to her feet, infusing the motion with a glorious hint of decisive finality. “Well then,” she declared. “I think our next move is pretty obvious. We’ve got to go and find the green-eyed ghoul and ask him ourselves.”
Everyone looked at me, since I was the only one who’d seen him up close and personal. She was right, and I knew it; but she was only half right, really. “No. We’ve got to do more than that. We’ve got to con him into coming back.”
15
Fresh Resolve
CHICKAMAUGA, GEORGIA, SIX WEEKS EARLIER
Pete Buford was enraged, and he was afraid, and he’d spent too much of the last few years feeling helpless. When he left the battlefield he’d had a wet trail in his pants and the hot sting of terrified humiliation to lash him onward. It couldn’t be like that. It couldn’t be over so easily; he hadn’t had a good idea in his entire life, and the one time he had a project—a real honest-to-God goal—it had been thwarted before it even got under way good.
There had to be an answer to it. There had to be a way around this obstacle.
He fumed and growled all the way to the car, then all the way to the trunk, where he dug out some rags. He scowled at the urine stains as they began to dry on his jeans. Pete grumbled at the gasoline can in the backseat and swore as he ripped the cap off.
He grimaced when he dumped it down his crotch. He wrinkled his nose at the pungent odor wafting up to his nostrils. It made his eyes water, or maybe he was so mad he was almost crying. He wouldn’t have admitted to either possibility.
The drive home was spent shaking, cursing, and stabbing his fingers at the half-broken radio that only wanted to pick up one or two stations.
He’d tell Uncle Rudy he’d run out of gas. He’d tell him he’d stopped with the can and spilled it. That would account for the smell. The rest would come out in the wash. The rest he could lie about if he had to.
He hated himself for running.
He’d run like a little girl, screaming away from the boogeyman.
But once he’d calmed down some, about halfway home, he decided to be honest with himself: It had been pretty fucking scary. He vibrated with anxiety, rubbing his foot against the gas pedal and making the old beater drive funnier than it usually did.
What the hell was that? he wondered. I mean really, what the hell was that?
It wasn’t just that he’d never seen anything like it; he’d never even heard of anything like it. He’d never read about anything like that in a story, even.
On second thought, that wasn’t true. Like everybody else in the valley, he’d heard stories about Old Green Eyes. But they weren’t the sort of stories you believed—not if you were smart. Not if you were stupid, even. Not if you were the most gullible son of a bitch in the world—you didn’t believe the Old Green Eyes stories.
Not for real.