The Barrel is an eclectic little joint. It’s not big enough to serve as host to a party of any size, but that never stops anyone from holding them there. The place is a local landmark, and half the city would be inconsolable if it were to close.
The first floor is all dim yellow lights, beat-to-hell hardwoods, and badly scratched windows. None of the tables are the same size, and they’ve all been lovingly carved with the same slogans you find spray-painted on overpasses. Most of these tables wobble, and all of them are warped to some state other than flat. By the time evening comes around, there are rarely enough chairs to go around, so some patrons always wind up sitting on benches that were once padded but now leak foam stuffing onto the ground.
Up by the bar a colorful jukebox lists a number of diverse titles, but every time I’ve ever been inside, Dire Straits has been playing. If it’s not the Romeo and Juliet song, it’s “Money for Nothing.”
Behind the jukebox, a circular, ironwork staircase of narrow width and dubious stability leads to the roof. Parties usually begin upstairs, because there’s more room to spread out. Also, the rickety metal stairs serve as a good litmus test to determine who’s sober enough to leave. If you can make it down that treacherous spiral without breaking your neck, you’re probably okay to drive.
We skipped the popular (yet uncomfortable) corner seat and made for the stairs. Already we could hear familiar voices up on the roof. Our heads crested the second floor in time to see a waitress arrive with a fresh round of drinks, sparking a happy holler from the birthday boy.
I didn’t know Chris well, but his brother Mike used to date the daughter of a friend of Lu’s. Jamie didn’t know Chris or any of his near relations, and he wasn’t particularly well liked among some members of the group; but he had a longstanding interest in Mike’s best friend’s sister—who might be in attendance.
In this city, that’s plenty enough connection to crash a shindig.
About thirty people had camped upstairs, sprawling amoeba-style around most of the round metal tables. I knew most of the attendees in that vaguely acquainted sort of way in which most people here know everyone else in their age group—which is to say, I’d seen them around either the coffee shop or the university.
Jamie and I pulled up chairs and snagged the waitress while we had the chance. I put in an order for a fully loaded cheeseburger and a Coke, and Jamie ordered a half-carafe of wine.
It wasn’t until the waitress had made her tired way down the stairs that I realized the topic of the conversation we’d wandered into.
“I heard it from Dave. He quit his job out there on Thursday,” my friend Benny, a thin guy with glasses, announced without his eyes ever leaving his sketchbook. I wondered how he could see well enough to draw, but he seemed to be doing fine with a ray or two cast by the nearby streetlamp.
“Which Dave?” Jamie asked.
Ben tapped his pencil against the sketchbook’s spiral. “Dave Young. Katie’s ex-boyfriend—you’d know him if you saw him. He’s Josh’s cousin, the one who used to be in the army.”
Nods of recognition went round the tables. Chris, the spectacularly drunk birthday boy, sloshed beer over his wrists and added his own two cents. “You mean the one who works out at the battlefield?”
“Yes, baby.” His girlfriend, Angie, dabbed at the patch of beer now freshly decorating her knee. “That’s the one. What did he say about it, Benny? Is it true about the ghosts?”
Our resident artist squinted down at his paper. “Dave said they were talking about closing down the park for a while.”
“They can’t close the park!” Chris’s equally inebriated sibling Mike gasped what we all were thinking. “That park’s been open for two hundred years!”
“Well, a hundred and fifteen. Since almost thirty years after the war,” Ben corrected him. “But they’re saying that they need to keep people out of it until they find out what’s going on. They don’t want to get sued because someone has a wreck in the park or a heart attack from seeing a ghost.”
“Surely you can’t sue a national park?” I asked, but no one seemed to hear me, or maybe no one knew the answer.
“They can’t keep us out of that park,” Chris swore.
“They sure as hell can’t,” his brother Mike agreed. “We should go down there right now and—”
“No, no, no. I don’t think so.” Angie took his beer away and set it down on the table before she could get any wetter. She’d be driving both of them home later, so she was sticking with soda. “Not tonight, anyway. Maybe this weekend, say Saturday night, we’ll pull a party together and go out there. That might be fun.”
“The park closes at sundown, doesn’t it?”
Everyone got quiet and turned to stare at me. Several of them said in chorus, “So?”
Benny folded his sketchbook closed and tucked the mechanical pencil into his shirt pocket. “There’s a back way onto the grounds. Everybody knows about it.”
“I don’t,” I assured him, but that only opened me up to the invitation I didn’t want to get.
“We could show you. Hey, that would be neat—you’re into ghosts, right?” Angie handed Mike his beer back and scooted her chair closer to mine. She looked excited and frightened at once. Her straight blond hair dipped past her ears and fell into her face. She tucked it back into place. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Um, I don’t know. I might be busy Saturday.”
“But you’re the local ghost expert,” Mike chimed in, punctuating the sentence with a mighty belch. “You’ve got to come along to protect us.”
“Protect you? From ghosts?”Angie tapped my side with her elbow. “From themselves, more likely. You really oughta come. Have you ever been there?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. A long time ago.”
Besides one or two elementary school field trips, Dave and Lu had driven me out there when I was in high school. I’d been doing a paper for history class. The place had looked dull to me then—all empty and neatly mowed, with statues and obelisks peppering the landscape.
“Have you ever gone there at night?” Jamie leaned in close to ask.
“No. And I don’t have any burning desire to, either.”
They dog-piled on me then, teasing and goading. They insisted that it was easy as pie to sneak in at night, through the suburbs on the edge of the property. They told me all about how spooky it was—and how haunted it was, and how much fun it would be to go. “Spoken like people who have never actually seen a ghost,” I observed, and they just laughed.
“Look, if you’re serious about this,” I said, because I didn’t believe for a moment that they were, “you need to put more thought into it than this. You can’t just drag a couple dozen people onto federally protected land in the middle of the night. You’re not exactly a bunch of ninjas when you’re stone sober—God knows you’d have the cops all over you before you could say ‘Old Green Eyes.’”
“Ooh, Old Green Eyes!” Mike gurgled. “I saw him once. Long time ago.”
“Bullshit,” someone said from the fringe of the circle.
We all turned to regard our waitress, who had returned with my food and Jamie’s wine. She sat it down in front of us without making eye contact with anyone, then stood up straight and tucked her tray under her arm.
“If you’d actually seen him,” she practically whispered, “you’d never cross the Georgia state line again.”
Everyone got quiet then. A couple of people misunderstood her enough to think she was being pissy. But I knew true fear when I saw it.
5
Down by the River
I’d abandoned Jamie to my tab and a ride home from someone else and was walking back to my car when my cell vibrated. Usually I leave it turned off and let all incoming calls go straight to voicemail, but since Lu and Dave were out of town, I’d left it active. Accidents and emergencies happen, and I’d have hated for them to be unable to reach me if they needed to.
I held up the phone and pressed a button to illuminate the caller’s number. It began with a 423 area code, so it was local, but I didn’t recognize the remaining seven digits. I don’t give out the number to many people, so I don’t usually ignore it. Curiosity got the better of me.
“Hello?”
“Eden, you’ve got to help me!” The words tumbled fast, buzzing into my ear over an imperfect connection. My stomach lurched. I held the phone back and checked the number again—yes, it was definitely local.
“Malachi?”
I was downtown on a city sidewalk, and even though it was late I was well within view of the still-crowded Pickle Barrel, so I was probably within hearing distance of anyone seated up on the roof. I lowered my voice and turned my head away from the restaurant.
“Malachi, where are you?”
He answered me too quickly to be understood. He was keeping his words soft, as if he too was afraid of being overheard.
“Stop it stop it stop it,” I ordered. “Wait just a second.”
I withdrew my keys from my pocket and let myself inside the car. When I closed the door behind me I hit the locks, halfheartedly paranoid. Clutching the phone between my ear and my shoulder, I strapped myself in and started the engine.
“Okay. One more time. What’s going on—and where are you?”
“You’ve got to help me!” he repeated, hissing in his fright or worry.
“I think I got that part. Keep talking, I’m listening.”
“I’m at Moccasin Bend.”
I nearly dropped the phone. “You’re where?”
“I’m at the Bend. You’ve got to come get me.” He sounded like he was about to cry; and if he wasn’t, I planned to give him something to cry about when I caught up to him.
“Are you insane? Hell, what am I saying—of course you’re insane! That’s why they sent you there in the first place! You came up here, didn’t you? I told you to stay in Florida, but you wouldn’t listen; you came up here, and you got caught. Christ, I swear to God—”