‘Why did she try to kill Kyra? I don’t understand that. If you broke Sara Tidwell’s hold on this earthly plane of ours when you dissolved her bones, the curse should have . . . why are you looking at me that way?’
‘You’d understand if you’d ever met Devore,’ I said. ‘This is the man who lit the whole fucking TR on fire as a way of saying goodbye when he headed west to sunny California. I thought of him the second I pulled the wig off, thought they’d swapped identities somehow. Then I thought Oh no, it’s her all right, it’s Rogette, she’s just lost her hair somehow. ‘
‘And you were right. The chemo.’
‘I was also wrong. I know more about ghosts than I did, Frank. Maybe the most important thing is that what you see first, what you think first . . . that’s what’s usually true. It was him that day.
Devore. He came back at the end. I’m sure of it. At the end it wasn’t about Sara, not for him. At the end it wasn’t even about Kyra. At the end it was about Scooter Larribee’s sled.’
Silence between us. For a few moments it was so deep that I could actually hear the house breathing. You can hear that, you know. If you really listen. That’s something else I know now.
‘Christ,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think Devore came east from California to kill her,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t the original plan.’
‘Then what was? Get to know his granddaughter? Mend his fences?’
‘God, no. You still don’t understand what he was.’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘A human monster. He came back to buy her, but Mattie wouldn’t sell. Then, when Sara got hold of him, he began to plan Ki’s death. I suspect that Sara never found a more willing tool.’
‘How many did she kill in all?’ Frank asked.
‘I don’t know for sure. I don’t think I want to. Based on Jo’s notes and clippings, I’d say that there were perhaps four other . . . directed murders, shall we call them? . . . in the years between 1901
and 1998. All children, all K-names, all closely related to the men who killed her.’
‘My God.’
‘I don’t think God had much to do with it . . . but she made them pay, all right.’
‘You’re sorry for her, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I would have torn her apart before I let her put so much as a finger on Ki, but of course I am. She was raped and murdered. Her child was drowned while she herself lay dying. My God, aren’t you sorry for her?’
‘I suppose I am. Mike, do you know who the other boy was? The crying boy? Was he the one who died of blood-poisoning?’
‘Most of Jo’s notes concerned that part of it — it’s where she got started. Royce Merrill knew the story well. The crying boy was Reg Tidwell, Junior. You have to understand that by September of 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last show in Castle County, almost everyone on the TR
knew that Sara and her boy had been murdered, and almost everyone had a good idea of who’d done it.
‘Reg Tidwell spent a lot of that August hounding the County Sheriff, Nehemiah Bannerman. At first it was to find them alive — Tidwell wanted a search mounted — and then it was to find their bodies, and then it was to find their killers . . . because once he accepted that they were dead, he never doubted that they’d been murdered.
‘Bannerman was sympathetic at first. Everyone seemed sympathetic at first. The Red-Top crowd had been treated wonderfully during their time on the TR — that was what infuriated Jared the most — and I think you can forgive Son Tidwell for making a crucial mistake.’
‘What mistake was that?’
Why, he got the idea that Mars was heaven, I thought. The TR must have seemed like heaven to them, right up until Sara and Kito went for a stroll, the boy carrying his berry-bucket, and never came back. It must have seemed that they’d finally found a place where they could be black people and still be allowed to breathe.
‘Thinking they’d be treated like regular folks when things went wrong, just because they’d been treated that way when things were right. Instead, the TR clubbed together against them. No one who had an idea of what Jared and his protégés had done condoned it, exactly, but when the chips were down . . . ‘
‘You protect your own, you wash your dirty laundry with the door closed,’ Frank murmured, and finished his drink.
‘Yeah. By the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their little community down by the lake had begun to break up — this is all according to Jo’s notes, you understand; there’s not a whisper of it in any of the town histories.
‘By Labor Day the active harassment had started — so Royce told Jo. It got a little uglier every day — a little scarier — but Son Tidwell flat didn’t want to go, not until he found out what had happened to his sister and nephew. He apparently kept the blood family there in the meadow even after the others had taken off for friendlier locations.
‘Then someone laid the trap. There was a clearing in the woods about a mile east of what’s now called Tidwell’s Meadow; it had a big birch cross in the middle of it. Jo had a picture of it in her studio. That was where the black community had their services after the doors of the local churches were closed to them. The boy — Junior — used to go up there a lot to pray or just to sit and meditate. There were plenty of folks in the township who knew his routine. Someone put a leghold trap on the little path through the woods that the boy used. Covered it with leaves and needles.’
‘Jesus,’ Frank said. He sounded ill.
‘Probably it wasn’t Jared Devore or his logger-boys who set it, either — they didn’t want any more to do with Sara and Son’s people after the murders, they kept right clear of them. It might not even have been a friend of those boys. By then they didn’t have that many friends. But that didn’t change the fact that those folks down by the lake were getting out of their place, scratching at things better left alone, refusing to take no for an answer. So someone set the trap. I don’t think there was any intent to actually kill the boy, but to maim him? Maybe see him with his foot off, condemned to a lifetime crutch? I think they may have gotten that far in their imagining.
‘In any case it worked. The boy stepped in the trap . . . and for quite awhile they didn’t find him.
The pain must have been excruciating. Then the blood-poisoning. He died. Son gave up. He had other kids to think about, not to mention the people who’d stuck with him. They packed up their clothes and their guitars and left. Jo traced some of them to North Carolina, where many of the descendants still live. And during the fires of 1933, the ones young Max Devore set, the cabins burned flat’
‘I don’t understand why the bodies of Sara and her son weren’t found,’ Frank said. ‘I understand that what you smelled — the putrescence — wasn’t there in any physical sense. But surely at the time . . . if this path you call The Street was so popular . . . ‘
‘Devore and the others didn’t bury them where I found them, not to begin with. They would have started by dragging the bodies deeper into the woods — maybe up to where the north wing of Sara Laughs stands now. They covered them with brush and came back that night. Must have been that night; to leave them any longer would have drawn every carnivore in the woods. They took them someplace else and buried them in that roll of canvas. Jo didn’t know where, but my guess is Bowie
Ridge, where they’d spent most of the summer cutting. Hell, Bowie Ridge is still pretty isolated.
They put the bodies somewhere; we might as well say there.’
‘Then how . . . why . . . ‘
‘Draper Finney wasn’t the only one haunted by what they did, Frank — they all were. Literally haunted. With the possible exception of Jared Devore, I suppose. He lived another ten years and apparently never missed a meal. But the boys had bad dreams, they drank too much, they fought too much, they argued . . . bristled if anyone so much as mentioned the Red-Tops . . . ‘
‘Might as well have gone around wearing signs reading KICK US, WE’RE GUILTY,’ Frank commented.