THE FARM

Scott Nicholson

Chapter One

Lilacs.

The scent drifted from the cupboard and crossed the kitchen as if riding a late spring breeze. Katy Logan sniffed and frowned. It was late September, too deep in the Appalachian autumn for any flowers but goldenrod, jewel weed, and hummingbird plant. She hoped Gordon wasn't the type of man who believed in packaged deodorizers, those little plug-in things that looked great on a television commercial. The kind featuring a fashionable mom who could clean the house, build a career, raise three kids, and still manage to be dynamite in the sack, all without rumpling the pages of Cosmopolitan. Katy had no doubt the scent was lilacs. Her mother, Althea, was a gardener, though her Floridian climate was eight hundred miles and four thousand feet of elevation removed from the North Carolina mountains. Mom had a string of blue ribbons from flower shows across the panhandle. Katy's green thumb had turned a sickly shade of chartreuse somewhere at the age of six, when she'd dumped a bucket of mud on a prize species of two-tone rose. Sent to bed without supper, Katy had fantasized about ripping Mom's flower garden up by its roots, starting with the lilacs.

She let the pot she was scrubbing slide into the soapy water. The scent came again, stronger. It wasn't a pure smell. The lilac had a faint musky undertone. Like old fish.

God she shouldn't have cooked Gordon swordfish last night. At least the heady lilac disguised the odor a little. She was as hapless in the kitchen as she was in the garden. She had always resisted the petty tyranny of the kitchen, its perfect order and shiny regimen, the confusing array of spices. Did tomato-based sauces need basil or garlic? Was it cinnamon or was it cloves that dominated a pump-kin pie? Did swordfish demand a freshly squeezed lemon or a splash of soy sauce?

Katy had gone with both lemon and soy last night, determined to be a good wife for Gordon. A textbook wife. An Old Testament wife, if necessary. She'd been the other kind of wife and didn't have much to show for it.

Except Jett.

Katy dried her hands. A door slammed beyond the kitchen. Jett must be coming in, ready to hit the books and prepare to wow the sixth grade teachers at Cross Valley Elementary tomorrow.

"Jett?" A smile slipped across Katy's lips, and she could practi-cally feel the furrows in her forehead smooth out. Like a Cosmo mom. No stress. Wrinkles were for those who succumbed to grav-ity. Katy waited for the footsteps of her daughter. Jett was on the threshold of blossoming, getting swells on her chest, and the sub-sequent adolescent turmoil made her unpredictable. She was as likely to break into tears over an imaginary slight as to crawl on her mother's lap for a good cuddle. Her first expression would reveal the mood of the moment.

Katy was glad to be done with the kitchen, anyway. That lilac smell had given her a headache and she was going to thaw some pizzas for dinner. Last night's swordfish experiment had taught her that she'd better take it easy on becoming Supermom. Simply slap-ping an S on her chest hadn't eased today's stink any. She sprinkled baking soda into the trash can, hoping the odor would fade before Gordon came home.

"Jett?" she called again, closing the freezer.

Foot stomps, not steps.

Her daughter was in a mood that could only possess a twelve-year-old. Anger, anger, anger with fat leather heels. A hard day in the classroom, no doubt. Or a boy. Probably both, since those went hand in hand when you were in your first year at a new school and real boys were just starting to rival Goth bands and horses for your attention. Except Jett had made an art form of being an outsider. Black wardrobe and attitude to spare.

Katy left the kitchen without a backward glance, the lilac-and-fish aroma and the whirring microwave occupying the room. Even after four months here, she still hadn't become comfortable with the layout of Gordon's house.

No, not Gordon's house. Our house. Until death do us part, just like I promised. For the second time.

The front door of the two-story farmhouse opened onto the liv-ing room, with a foyer that was barely big enough for dirty shoes and damp umbrellas. The kitchen stood off to the right, interrupted by a stretch of hardwood floor that contained a dining table. Four chairs. Gordon must have always been an optimist, even during those last five years of bachelorhood.

Katy almost called for Jett again, but stopped herself. That might be construed as nagging. Katy had dropped the two of them into the middle of this new situation, so she owed her daughter a little slack. If Katy were compelled to be honest with herself, something she desperately avoided, she would admit Jett had en-dured the tougher transition.

Katy had done nothing more than say "I do" and turn in her res-ignation at Wachovia Financial Services. Sure, she'd hated Charlotte anyway, and a small town called Solom in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina seemed like the perfect escape from the thirty-two years that had given her nothing but a beautiful child and a bottomless well of insecurity. But for Jett, this move had been the equivalent of an emotional tsunami.

Not only had Jett left her father behind, she'd said good-bye to a small private school and a number of friends she'd known since di-aper days. The two-bedroom apartment on Queen Street had been traded for a restored wooden-frame house on thirty acres of slanted land. Jett couldn't even get a decent cell phone signal out here, a point she'd drilled into Katy at every available opportunity. So Katy didn't completely blame her for storming up the stairs to her room.

As a mother, Katy had the duty to go up and tap quietly on Jett's door. On her way, she made a halfhearted swipe at the dust that covered a curly maple coffee table. How could dust collect so fast? As a wedding present, Gordon had hired a professional cleaning service to perform a top-to-bottom wipe-down. But already the weight of domestic responsibility had settled in Katy's heart as heavy as the dampness from the stream that ran behind the house.

As she climbed the stairs, she expected to hear the floor-shak-ing beat of industrial Goth, music that Katy dared not criticize lest it gain a permanent slot on her daughter's playlist. Katy had helped Jett shop for her first studded dog collar, a possibly scarring expe-rience for them both. Since then, Jett had eschewed the collars as part of her black leather-and-vinyl outfits, along with the occa-sional denim complement, and Katy had withheld fashion advice. Katy didn't relate to the Goth look, but she recalled her own youth-ful experiments in hippie chic, frayed bell-bottoms and paisley blouses worn without a bra. She shuddered to imagine herself in such a costume now, and figured Jett had the right to make her own choices she would later regret. Except the choice to do drugs.

Katy paused at the top of the stairs. Below, the footsteps crossed the living room, headed for the kitchen.

"Jett?"

A snack. No adolescent's afternoon was complete without an apple or a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. They were growing, after all, pushing toward adulthood, shoving aside the generation ahead. Swordfish, for God's sake. What had she been thinking? Katy knew swordfish was loaded with mercury, but figured the toxicity wouldn't do any lasting damage upon first exposure. She'd been trying to impress Gordon, plain and simple. Jett liked it okay, she barely ate dinner these days anyway, what with all that after-school snacking and chronic dieting. Gordon had taken a first bite, lifted his eyebrows, then shifted his attention back to the book he was reading. He'd turned the page before wiping his lips and saying, "Honey, you've outdone yourself. I've never tasted such exquisite brook trout." Katy had smiled, sipped at her glass of white wine, swallowed the lump in her throat, and said what any newlywed would say. "I'm glad you like it, dear."

Instead of going back downstairs in search of her wayward daughter, Katy went down the hall to her and Gordon's bedroom. She opened the walnut door with a creak of century-old hinges. The room was always dark, even now with me five o'clock sun at the windows. The room was thick with Southern Appalachian history, outsider sculptures in seven native woods, stacks of tapes from old evangelical radio stations, dozens of family Bibles arrayed in rows across the shelves. Gordon's work was his life, had apparently al-ways been. She wondered if he would ever be able to change. She'd married him on the off chance that he'd be one of the very few men to pull it off.

No, that wasn't entirely true. She'd married him for a number of reasons that were as shallow and tangled as the roots of a black lo-cust tree.

A rustling arose from inside the closet on Gordon's side of the room.

Had Jett hidden in there, playing hide-and-seek like a four-year-old? The closet was barely big enough for a person to stand inside, and was filled with the regalia of an academic's profession: black and blue suits, white shirts, polished shoes, and a tuxedo. The closet was open, the ancient door handle missing its knob.

Jett wasn't in there.

Nobody home.

She'd heard no footsteps.

Stress.

From slapping the old S on the chest.

The noise came again from the hollow of the closet. Mice. A house developed holes over the years, especially in a rural setting. Generations of mice had the opportunity to search for crevices, to explore the corner boards and probe the openings where utility lines entered the walls. Supermom would have to learn to set traps. Smith mice for the Smith house.

She'd mention it to Gordon. Maybe he was the type who would insist on taking care of the problem. He'd never been much of a tra-ditionalist in other gender areas, though. He'd let her keep her maiden name of Logan. Katy had said she wanted to remain a Logan for sentimental reasons, because her grandmother had died a few years before. In truth, changing her name back after her di-vorce had been so troublesome she never wanted to endure it again. Not that she was planning to get divorced again. Of course, she'd also said she'd never get married again, and here she was, in Gordon's house, her Supermom cape already in need of a good dry-cleaning.

The front door swung open and banged closed. "Mom, I'm home."

Katy frowned at the closet, wondering if she should peek inside and scare the mice away. No, might as well let them get comfort-able. Made them easier to snare. She hurried from the room and called from the top of the stairs, "Honey, what's going on?"

"Nothing. I just got out of school. I caught a ride from Mrs. Stansberry up the road. You know, the math teacher."

Katy was halfway down the stairs when Jett came into view. Freckles like Mom, but black hair instead of red, cut short in bangs and the back spiked with mousse. The darker hair was one of Mark's genetic contributions, along with a gangly frame, though Jett had dyed it a shoe-polish black for dramatic effect. Jett had taken to slumping so she wouldn't tower over the sixth grade boys. Jett smacked her gum, a habit she'd picked up in Charlotte and clung to with all the defiance and resentment of a quarantined goat.

"I haven't met Mrs. Stansberry," Katy said. "I'd rather you not ride with strangers." Jett let her book bag drop to the floor. "She's not a stranger. She lives up the road. She knows Gordon."

Gordon. It was odd to hear Jett call him by his first name, as if he were an acquaintance instead of her stepfather. But "Dad" wouldn't do. Mark, for all his faults, deserved the sole right to that title. Even if he'd done little more than squirt a seed invisible to the naked eye, then roll over and snore.

"You could ride the bus."

Jett was already headed to the kitchen, heels clopping on the floor. Just like the footsteps Katy had heard minutes before. "The bus is lame," Jett said. "That's for third graders. Bethany's getting rides from a high school boy."

Katy descended the rest of the stairs, following into the kitchen. "This Bethany, she's in your class?" Jett pulled her head from the refrigerator. "Mom, she's in, like, seventh grade already. And he's only a sophomore. He flunked a grade, plus he's on the football team."

"I hope you have better judgment than that."

Jett kneed the refrigerator closed, hands full with a yogurt, Diet Sprite, celery, and a microwave burrito.

"Jeez, Mom. I'm not a kid anymore, okay? Remember last month?" The period. Even after all the mother-to-daughter talks about what it meant to be a woman, how puberty came earlier to females than males, how blood was all part of being a woman, Jett had still panicked when she'd awoken to find a red splotch on her sheets. Gordon had been in the bathroom, suiting up for the commute to Westridge University, so they'd both been spared an awkward mo-ment. Katy had helped her daughter clean up and choose an appro-priate feminine hygiene product.

"Okay," Katy said. "Just because you can have a baby doesn't mean you're ready to date high school boys."

"Mom, don't get in my face about it. I haven't done anything wrong." Jett leaned against the counter, set down her snacks, and peeled back the lid on the yogurt.

"Sorry, honey." Katy went back to the sink and the never-ending demand of dirty dishes. "I know the move has been hard on you."

Jett shrugged. "One place is as good as another."

"Do you smell lilacs?"

"All I smell is stinky fish. That swordfish was so not right. I mean, it tasted good and all, but there's not enough Lysol spray in the world to hide it."

Katy plunged her hands into the dishwater. "I'm sorry you had to give up Charlotte. I know you had a lot of friends there and—"

"We talked about it, okay? Jeez, you wouldn't even get married until I gave my permission."

"Please stop saying 'Jeez.' You know Gordon finds it disrespect-ful." Jett looked up, gave a theatrical lift of her arms, and said, "Do you see Gordon? I don't see Gordon. In fact, you never see Gordon. He's practically a ghost in his own life."

"He works hard, honey. He has a lot of responsibilities at the university."

"Assistant vice dean of continuing something-or-other? Sounds like a job he could do over the Internet."

"He also teaches."

"Like, what? One class this semester? A seminar on obscure hillbilly cults?"

"He's well known in his field."

"What field is that, exactly?"

"I don't know. Appalachian religion, I guess."

Jett dug into her yogurt. The Yoplait painted her lips a milky green. "So how are you handling giving up your career?"

"I have a career. I'm your mother and Gordon's wife."

"I meant one where you make money and get to dress up and do stuff. Get out of the house."

"I'm very happy, honey." Katy glanced at the orange rings of greasy suds floating on top of the dishwater. She forced her focus through the window, to the barns outside and the barbed-wire stretch of meadow. Gordon had seven head of cattle, two of them the black Angus variety. Gordon said that was where the breeding money was. Breeding money. Sounded a little obscene to Katy, like a prostitute's tip. But the goats were his real pride. She could see a few of them, young bucks separated from the rest because they would try to mount anything that moved, including their mothers.

"Maybe you can be happy enough for both of us." Jett had bot-tomed out on the Yoplait and popped the tab on the Sprite.

"It will get easier for you."

"Sure. In two years, when I start high school. By then, nobody will know I'm the new kid and I'll lose these Frankenstein wires." Jett grimaced, flashing her braces.

"They go fine with your studded bracelet."

"Cute, Mom."

"Solom isn't so bad. I kind of like the peace and quiet."

"That's the problem. It's as quiet as a graveyard. And what's with that creepy tabernacle up the road, with the steeple that looks like a KKK hood?"

"Gordon said it's a family tabernacle, charismatic Baptists."

"Did Gordon get baptized there or something? What do they dunk you in, goat's milk?"

"Honey, Gordon is taking good care of us. He opened up his home and heart. I know he's not your dad, but he's trying his best. Let's give it some time, okay?"

"Time. You're already old and over with and you've got all the time in the world. I'm only twelve and every second counts." Jett walked her burrito to the microwave.

"Don't get too full before dinner. I'm planning spaghetti."

"From a can, I hope."

"Jett."

"Sorry, Mom. I'm on a diet, anyway."

"Girls shouldn't be on diets." Katy wished she had canceled her subscription to Cosmopolitan. Katy had never been able to measure up, and Jett had often thumbed through those same magazine pages. The Buddhists said desire was the cause of all suffering. But Buddhists occasionally set themselves aflame to prove a point.

"It's okay," Jett said, then began reading aloud from the burrito wrapper. "Calories, three fifteen. Grams of fat, fifteen. Serving size, two ounces." She turned the wrapper around. "Apparently this single burrito contains three servings, so I won't have to eat again until lunch tomorrow."

"You'd better be hungry in time for the spaghetti or I'll start serving up goat meat." Goats had become a joke between them because half the local farms raised the animals. Beyond Gordon's cow pasture was a hill-side dotted with the stunted white creatures, their heads constantly down as they gnawed the world to its roots. They preferred to browse in the forest, only coming down at dusk when Gordon fed them grain or hay. Gordon's breeders had been fruitful this fall, and the herd seemed to have doubled in size since the wedding.

"Do goats smell worse than swordfish?"

"Depends on which end you stick your nose in."

"Gross, Mom." Jett gathered up the remnants of her snack, leav-ing the empty yogurt cup on the counter. "I'm going upstairs to study. If the phone rings, I'm not home."

"Expecting a call?"

"Not from anybody you know." And Jett was out of the room, leaving Katy with a kitchen that had too many items out of place. She glanced at the clock. Gordon might be home soon. Or maybe not. This was Tuesday, and the departmental staff often went out to-gether on Tuesdays. Something about celebrating almost getting through half a week.

She decided to put a pot of water on just in case. Spaghetti only took fifteen minutes. She would be brave and not resort to the pre-pared sauces in the pantry. Instead, she would go for diced toma-toes and fresh mushrooms. Except, what did you spice a spaghetti sauce with? She ducked into the pantry and pulled out the Gregorio. She held the jar near her face and read the ingredients. Salt, oregano, basil, garlic. Okay, she could handle that. She didn't know the proper ratios but if she was conservative, then it might balance out. If worse came to worse, she could fry up some ham-burger, greasy mad cow that would wipe out all the other flavors. Or goat. Goat would do the trick.

Goatghetti. A traditional Appalachian-Italian dish.

She tucked the jar back on the pantry shelf, then paused.

The smell of lilac rose like a solid thing, brushed against Katy, embraced her. She shivered, though the pantry was dry and breeze-less.

Footsteps sounded again, those hard heels leading from the pantry and across the kitchen. No.

She doesn't exist.

No matter what Katy had seen and heard and imagined these past few weeks, this kitchen belonged to her. This was her house now. Until death she and Gordon did part.

Behind Katy, the Gregorio fell to the floor with a brittle shatter-ing of glass.

Chapter Two

Lame, lame, lame.

Jett tried to concentrate on her homework. World history, mem-orizing the long list of white Europeans, whom they killed, and when. The problem with history textbooks was they never got into the why of it all. Of course, the sixth grade spent a day each on India and Africa, and China, the world's most populous country, earned a shared chapter with Japan. Jett decided world history could be summed up in a single word, and she'd write it in on the next essay test: B-O-R-I-N-G. Make that two words. F-U-C-K-I-N-G boring.

Her attention wandered from the book in front of her. If only she had an Xbox or a TV in her room. Too bad she'd gotten stuck with one of those weird moms, the kind who checked up on their daughters and paid attention to their moods. Why couldn't she have Bethany's mom, who had signed for birth control pills, given her daughter a cell phone with unlimited minutes, and turned her loose with a football stud? Now that was love. That was under-standing. That was knowing what a daughter needed. Jett looked out the window. Anywhere but at her book. The hills crawled away toward the horizon, a few barns and houses scattered among the green hills. Solom, North Carolina. Whoopdie-shit. She'd taken to cussing in her mind. Rarely out loud, because Mom was one of those old-fashioned types who said cussing was the cheap tool of small minds, and Gordon was a bastard about blasphemy. Better to think up something clever and leave them baf-fled and off-balance, Mom always said. Of course, it was easy for Mom. She hadn't been twelve years old in a century or so. She'd forgotten what it was like.

Solom. Population what? Three dozen, unless you counted the horses and goats and cows?

Fucking Solom.

Three churches, a post office, a general store, and five Rebel flags.

Charlotte wasn't all that great, either. At Jett's last public school, a kid had gotten knifed at the bus stop over a dope deal. Dope was one of those things that horrified the teachers and par-ents, but most of the kids didn't pay attention. It was there if you wanted it, and if you could hang with that crowd. Jett didn't hang but she'd tried a joint and then she was lighting up every morning before school. That led to other things, some of which had erased their tracks through her brain. Like father, like daughter. Of course, Solom might not even have dope, as backwoods as it was. The big deal here was joining the 4-H Club, breeding prize-winning livestock, and growing cabbage. And going to church. No fewer than a half dozen girls had invited Jett to their churches in her first week at school, and every one of them attended a different one. Drip Creek Union Baptist, Cross Valley Living Water Fellowship, True Light Tabernacle, Solom Free Will Baptist, Solom Methodist Church of the Cross, Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church. Gordon could probably explain the differences, but if he even tried, Jett would fall asleep by the second sentence. Not that Gordon was completely bad. Mom had spent months and months telling Jett all about it. About how Gordon was nice to Mom, how he took care of the family, how he opened up his home and gave them a future. About how Gordon would be a good father, not her real father, of course, but he would be there if she ever needed him. Gordon was rock solid, reliable, ready to take on arro-gant teachers and subscribe to Parent magazine, preview every PG-13 movie before Jett could watch it, and frown at every CD that had a black M stamped on the cover.

Sure, Gordon was all right. His eyes were dull and kind behind those thick lenses. He read a lot, and must be pretty smart, judging by all those degrees and certificates on the wall of his downstairs office. If world history started to mess with her, Gordon would probably have all the answers. But there was one major problem with Gordon.

He wasn't fucking goddamned her dad.

He was Gordon. Mark was Dad. Dad wasn't even Mark, just Dad. He didn't need a name. If she had a working cell phone like everybody else in the world she'd give Dad a call right now and tell him about this hick shit hole called Solom.

The wind blew the curtains apart, giving Jett a full view of the barn and its dark windows. She imagined ancient creatures flitting and fluttering around in me eaves.

Inside the hayloft, a light flashed. Must be a lantern, because it flickered and bobbed instead of cutting a solid arc the way a flash-light would.

Jett was no hick, but even she knew better than to carry a lantern in a barn. With all that straw and stuff, a dry barn was like a whatchamacallit on a galleon, the kind of ship the English sank in the Spanish Armada in 1588. A powder keg. Where one spark meant ka-blooey.

She went to the window. The sun was low in the sky but not yet touching the horizon, so it was probably a little before seven. Why did some lamebrain need a lantern in the barn when it wasn't even dark yet?

The light came again, flashed once, then twice. Like a signal. One if by goat, two if by cow. Jett pressed her face against the glass and peered up the slope that faced the barn's opening. Under the dark canopy of trees came a flurry of movement, as if something or someone had been beckoned by the light. Holy shit. This was like Nancy Drew or something. A real mys-tery.

Jett thought about telling Mom, because Mom kept saying they were in this together and would "get through it together." But Mom had enough to worry about, what with a smelly kitchen and dirty dishes and a new husband and nothing to do all day but clean house. Actually, Mom would enjoy a good mystery, but if things got the slightest bit squirrelly, Jett would be sent to her room until matters calmed down. Who wanted calm? Certainly not a girl who was now a woman, almost, at least in the ways that counted.

She glanced at the textbook on her desk. The F-word was get-ting lame and she should come up with a better alternative. But for now, it would have to do.

"Fuck off, Archduke Ferdinand."

She left the room, pausing at the head of the stairs to make sure Mom wasn't lurking. A pot clattered to the floor in the kitchen downstairs. "Shooty-booty," Mom yelled, not aware she had an au-dience. Mom was busy making the perfect meal, all four food groups represented, as colorful as anything in Women's World Weekly, the calories toted up, the serving dishes neatly spaced on the dining room table. When Mom was in housewife mode, Jett could get away with murder. She slipped down the stairs and out the back door. The barn was thirty yards away, weathered and gray, the sun bounc-ing off its dull tin roof. Gordon's barn was weird. The boards on the top story slanted upward in the angle of a V, and the loft opening was a black, up-side-down triangle. The barn leaned slightly to the side in a wobbly geometry. The other barns in Solom had the same appearance, like something M.C. Escher would draw while stoned. Jett's secret ob-session with art might come in handy if she ever needed to sketch a picture of her pathetic life.

The barn was separated from the house by a brown stretch of garden. The vegetables were mostly played out for the year, the tomato plants hanging like crucified black witches from their stakes. The only green was from the rows of fat cabbage heads, thick bottom leaves curled and yellowed, evoking an image of blondes buried to their necks in the dirt. That would be sweet. Jett despised blondes, resented their vacant faces and blue eyes and the amount of silliness that the boys expected from them. Plus, Bethany was blond.

The frost had come two nights before, sending the garden to seed. Jett had been delighted by the sight of it, waking up to see the billion silver sparkles across the landscape. Then she'd had to wait for the bus at the end of the road and decided that cold was for the Eskimos, she'd take a sunburn in Charlotte any day. She dreaded the coming winter. Snow was a rarity in the Piedmont, but these mountains on the Tennessee border received four or five feet of snow per year. Probably glaciers, too, cutting through the valley and scooping up goats, cows, donkeys, and enough rednecks to fill the stands at a tractor pull. Now, Jett, she could hear her mother say. Mom had a way of doing that, popping into her head with a voice of common sense when all Jett wanted to do was make fun of people and turn her back on the fucked-up world that never seemed to heed her wishes. She was an artist and an outsider, and that gave her a hammer. She could knock down anything that stood in her way.

Including the goat that stood between the edge of the garden and the barn. Gordon's pet goat.

It was mostly white, with a few tan splotches on its belly. Two worn stubs of horns grew out of the skull like the thumbs of dirty gloves. The eyes were the color of a storm ditch, and the black pupils were horizontal slits against them. The goat raised its head and stared at Jett. A long tuft of hair trailed from its gut to the ground matted with the animal's own urine. Somewhere in there was its mysterious penis, but she didn't look too closely.

Abraham, the goat was called. One of Gordon's religious jokes, the kind he let loose out of one side of his mouth, sitting in his overstuffed chair while reading a book, not caring if anyone heard him or not. Gordon had a lot of inside jokes. He would chuckle to himself, the sound rolling up from his ample belly and squirting out beneath his mustache. Poor Mom tried her best to keep up, to ask him to explain, but lately she'd taken to answering with a half-hearted laugh, a nod and a stare off into the corner of the room.

"Howdy, Abraham," Jett said. "Good kitty."

Abraham dipped his head swiveled his neck to look at the worn patch of meadow behind him, then swicked his short tail to scare up some flies.

"Nice kitty, kitty, kitty."

Jett approached the hog wire fence, getting a foothold in one of the wire squares along a locust post. The fence was topped with a single strand of barbed wire, but that would be no trouble for an athletic twelve-year-old. All it would take was a hop and skip, then a jump and roll like an Olympic gymnast finishing up a spastic rou-tine. Abraham twisted his jaws, bits of green dribbling from the pale lips. Halfway over the fence, her legs splayed on each side, Jett glanced up at the barn loft. The light flashed again, penetrating the center of the black triangle. Jett's hand hit the top wire and one of the rusted metal barbs pierced her palm.

"Shit fuck damn ass-wipe me, Jesus," she said, depleting her entire repertoire of bad words. She put the wound to her mouth and sucked, hoping to draw out the tetanus and West Nile virus and her-pes and whatever else you caught from farm animals. Abraham lifted his head, ears perking. His nose wriggled as he sniffed the air. He took three steps toward Jett.

"Nothing to see here, folks," Jett said. "Just move on along." The only moving Abraham was doing was closer.

"Seriously," she said, her voice cracking just a little. "No harm, no foul." Abraham snorted and his head doddered, the filthy white beard waving in the breeze. Jett looked back at the house. Mom was busy in the kitchen. Not that Jett would call for help, even if her life de-pended on it.

What's the f-ing deal? Scared of a doofy goat. No wonder the kids at school make fun of you. You ain't country, you ain't moun-tain, you ain't from round here. You 're freaky. You like to draw and read Vonnegut and Palahniuk. You have purple bootlaces, a black leather bracelet, and a button of Robert Smith in silhouette on your backpack. A Gothling in the land of Levi's and plaid cotton. A con-fused pilgrim in the Promised Land. No wonder you look like billy-goat bait from Abraham's point of view.

Easy meat.

"I'm not scared," she said to Abraham. "I'm the human here. I'm the one who can toss your ass on the altar or serve you up as stir-fry."

Abraham was unimpressed. He eased closer, his musky stench assailing her. Jett dangled from the top of the fence, her crotch dangerously close to the barbed wire. She couldn't flip herself to ei-ther side without risking some sort of unimaginable disaster, the kind that no amount of feminine products could stanch.

Maybe Mom would hear her if she yelled. But she pictured the scene that would greet Mom, her daughter straddling the fence, held at bay by a goat. Christ, she wasn't a four-year-old anymore. This wasn't a Charlotte playground where the crack kids would mug you for a nickel. This was her new home, the place where she would grow to womanhood, where she would crawl through her defining moments. High school, soccer team, first boyfriend, junior prom, and with any luck, the place where she would lose her vir-ginity. All those things were much scarier than a fucking goat.

She clenched her jaw and launched herself toward the meadow. Abraham, startled, stepped back. Jett landed on the balls of her feet, raised herself into a jujitsu stance, and said, "Bring it on, crap sack." Apparently the crap sack was awed by her display, because Abraham backed away, the horizontal pupils fixed on his sudden adversary. Jett waved her hands in a shooing motion and headed toward the barn. The center of her palm threw off bright sparks of pain, but she focused her attention on the loft. Whoever was in the loft must have seen her. The space beyond the triangle was dark and still. Jett hurried to the open mouth of the barn, expecting Abraham to charge at any moment. She'd prowled the barn before. That was one of the first things that caught her eye when Gordon had brought his new family to the mountain farm. Gordon had flashed a pleased grin at Jett's interest, but in truth, Jett had been desperate to get away from him. A two-hour car ride up from Charlotte had been about as much of the Gordon experience as she could handle for one day. So the barn had been both an adventure and an escape, and she'd explored it a couple of times since, imagining a roll in the hay with a boy, though she couldn't picture the boy's face or ex-actly what they were supposed to be doing, only that it was some-thing that would make grown-ups mad.

The bottom floor of the barn was nothing to get excited about. Strands of hay and dried waste laid a mottled carpet, and a few stalls at the back were empty. Apparently Gordon's ancestors had killed cattle and pigs here, but Gordon said it wasn't right to slaughter the innocent. Only the guilty. Not that Gord was a vege-tarian; he just let other people do his killing for him.

A set of crooked stairs led to the loft. Black squares in the floor above allowed hay to be thrown down to the animals. Jett listened, expecting footsteps. The mystery person upstairs must have seen her enter the barn. A delicious shiver ran up her spine. She twisted the leather bracelet for courage. Maybe she wouldn't die of boredom in Solom. Not with all the delightful conspiracy theories she could spin. The person upstairs could be a terrorist, Al-fucking-Qaeda, Osama's long-lost twin gone country bumpkin. Or a militant white supremacist. She'd never seen as many Confederate Stars and Bars as she had on the two-mile stretch from the main road to Gordon's house. The cluster of them around the tabernacle gave the feeling of an armed com-pound as if the natives would disappear into their bunkers at the first sign of a government license plate.

Sure, it was a weirdo, a freakazoid child rapist. In that case, what in the F was she doing standing there? Entering its lair, its zone?

Probably it was Odus Hampton, the stubble-faced guy in over-alls who sometimes did farm chores around the place. Odus didn't talk much, worked hard, and kept to himself. To Jett, Odus was the typical redneck, with big, rough hands and crooked teeth. As crooked as hers would be, if Gordon hadn't been wealthy enough to pay for braces.

Jett peeked through the gap between two siding boards. If the person upstairs was signaling someone, then maybe she could de-cipher the message. Turn the tables on him, get the goods and pull a little blackmail game. Accuse him of trespassing, maybe score some points with Gordon, for what that was worth. The stand of hardwoods where she'd seen the answering light was unwaveringly dark, the evening shadows creating a thick morass beneath the tops of the trees.

She leaned against the wall, held her breath, and listened. She peeked through the boards once more, and a rheumy green eye looked back at her. She yelped and fell on her rump, crab-crawling away from the eye. Then Abraham gave his moist snort, and Jett sighed, dust filling her nostrils. Scared out of her wits by a fucking goat.

Some Nancy Drew she was. More like a lame Olsen twin.

Jett stood and brushed herself off, determined not to be girly. Someone was upstairs, in Gordon's barn, without permission. In her barn. After all, she was family now, whether she liked it or not. She was part of this fucked-up stretch of uneven ground, it was her turf, home territory, the farm. Besides, if worse came to worse, she could yell for Mom and have an ally. Mom was always on her side, no matter the battle.

Some old bits of hardware hung from pegs on the wall: a length of chain, stinky brown rope, a hackamore, rusty branch clippers, and a backpack spray tank that looked like a leftover prop from a fifties big-bug sci-fi movie. Jett pictured herself slipping on the back-pack, finding some goggles, then clambering up the stairs and scar-ing the living bejesus out of the intruder. No time. Besides, that was a little over the top. Just being a Goth Lite was edgy enough. Maybe the tiny bit of black eyeliner that Mom allowed would be enough to frighten her adversary.

She eased up the stairs. The second tread creaked like an arthritic toad. She paused, letting her weight settle. No sound from above.

At the top of the stairs stood a rough door, sagging, the boards wired together. Jett was in full Nancy Drew mode now, fueled with a little Wonder Woman and some Jennifer Garner thrown in for good measure.

Assuming the secret signaler in the loft hadn't noticed her ap-proach, she could wait at the door, look through the cracks, and try to figure out what was going on.

She took the rest of the steps with all the patience of a widow. She sat on the top step, near the hinges, so she would be behind the door if it suddenly swung open. The interior of the barn had grown darker, and no doubt the sun was just beginning its slide down Three Hump Mountain in the west. She held her breath and put an ear to the door.

A snort. From below. She looked down.

Abraham stood on the barn floor, head raised. Looking right at her. Jett could swear the animal was grinning, teeth glimmering wetly in the half-light.

"Go away," she mouthed, giving Abraham the benefit of a doubt. Goats were renowned eating machines, reducing forests to waste-lands, eating the very fences that tried to hem them in. Maybe Abraham had a little bit of brains, since he didn't seem to be in the middle of eating something at the moment.

Abraham stared at her with those boxy pupils.

Jett looked around, found a dry corncob, and raised herself up to toss it. She flipped her arm forward and the cob spun end over end, striking Abraham just between the horns. He blinked and dipped his neck, grabbed the cob with his lips, and ground it be-tween his teeth. The sound was like that of an alphabet block dropped into a whirring blender.

"Shh," she said. She looked about for something else to throw, maybe something with a little heft. The hinges rasped behind her. She turned toward the door, lost her balance, and grabbed for the rail. The door yawned, shadows pouring out to match those that had risen from the floor. The thing loomed seven feet tall, a lantern in one hand that cast flickering shadows up into a face she couldn't see because of the straw hat pulled low. The other hand held a darkly gleaming sickle.

Chapter Three

Arvel Ward drew the curtains and turned away from the win-dow. Nights like this were best spent indoors. Goats would be walking tonight, and him that held sway over them. Other things would be afoot, too. Autumn was a time of bad magic. Solom did-n't need a Halloween midnight to open the door between the living and the dead; the door was already as thin as the pages of a dry Bible. Arvel had first seen Harmon Smith, better known as the Circuit Rider, on a pig path on the back side of Lost Ridge. Arvel was nine years old and on his way back from a Rush Branch fishing hole when he stopped at a gooseberry thicket. It had been August, and the berries were fat and pink, with green tiger stripes. Gooseberries gave him the runs, so he knew better than to keep eating them, but they were so tangy sweet he couldn't stop shoveling them in his mouth, despite the three rainbow trout in the little reed basket he used for a creel.

Harmon came upon him while he was lying in the shade, his belly swole up like a tick's. Arvel squinted as the man stood with lis back to the sun, the face lost in the wide, worn brim of the rounded hat. Arvel knew who it was right off. The Circuit Rider walked these hills looking for his horse, and had been looking ever since those other preachers had pitched in and murdered him. Arvel couldn't rightly blame Harmon Smith for doing all the terri-ble things people said he did. After all, he was buried in three dif-ferent graves and that wasn't any way for a soul to find peace, especially for a man of the cloth. Legend had it Harmon pitched Johnny Hampton under the water wheel at the old Rominger gristmill, and Johnny's foot got caught in one of the paddles. Over and over went little Johnny, shouting and blubbering each time his head broke free of the water, grabbing a lungful of air just before he went under again. Took about twenty rounds of the wheel before he tuckered out and drowned while the mill hands desperately tried to stop the wheel. His death went down in the church records and the county deed of-fice as an accident, but folks in Solom kept their own secret ledger. Arvel's great-uncle Kenny was galloping down a moonlit road when he came to the covered bridge that used to cross the river near the general store. Everybody liked the nice echo of horse-shoes clanging off those wooden runners, so Kenny had picked up speed and burst through. Trouble was, a carpenter had been doing repairs on the bridge's roof that day and left a level line in the rafters. The line had slipped during the night until it was about neck-high to a man on a horse. Kenny's head hadn't been cut clean through, but there was barely enough connecting meat left to stuff a sausage casing. Others had fallen into hay rakes, caught blood poisoning from saw blades, and old Willet Miller had been gored by a goat, his in-testines yanked out and hanging like noodles on a fork. So Arvel had had no expectations of ever getting up and walking away from the encounter mat long-ago day. He was just glad for two tilings: he'd go with a belly full of gooseberries and he wouldn't have to clean the fish before supper.

"Boy," Harmon Smith had said in greeting, touching the brim of his hat. The voice held no fire and brimstone, not even the thunder of a preacher. It was just plain talk.

"You're the Circuit Rider." Arvel figured it was no time for fool-ing around; plus he ought to be on his best behavior. Free Will Baptists earned their way to heaven, and Arvel figured he had to do some making up for the horehound candy he'd pilfered from the jar down at the general store. Even stealing from a Jew probably counted as a sin in God's all-seeing eyes.

Harmon's head swiveled back and forth, offering just a hint of the man's angular nose and sharp chin.

"Doesn't seem like I'm doing much riding, does it?"

Arvel squinted, trying to make out the man's eyes in that des-perate black shadow beneath the hat. It almost seemed like the man had no face at all, only a solid glob of dark. His suit was black and pocked with holes, and he wore a tow-linen shirt, material only poor kids wore in those days. "You looking for your horse?"

"Why, have you seen one?"

Arvel made a big show of looking up and down the pig path. "I think I saw one down that way," he said, and nodded in the direc-tion of the Ward farm.

Arvel couldn't have said the man exactly grinned, but the dark-ness broke in the lower part of the face, revealing a gleam of ochre enamel. "And I suppose you'd be leading me to it, right?"

"Why, yes, sir."

"Respect for elders. That speaks well for you, boy."

"I try to do right by people," Arvel said, as much for God's ears as for Harmon's.

"All right, show me that horse."

Arvel struggled to his feet, hitched up the suspenders he'd un-hooked while digesting, and headed down the pig path, careful not to walk too fast. The Circuit Rider followed, scuffed boots knock-ing dust in the air. Arvel tried to sneak a look back to catch the man's face now that they were heading into the sun, but somehow the preacher stayed just out of plain view. Arvel had his cane pole over his shoulder, and wondered idly what would happen if his hook accidentally sank in the Circuit Rider's flesh. That would make some fish story.

They went through the apple orchard that divided the Smith and Ward properties. The apples were small and tart, still weeks away from ripening, and Arvel's belly was already gurgling from all the gooseberries. He wondered if he'd have to make a dash behind a tree before they reached the outhouse. Would the Circuit Rider give him privacy, or stand over him with the wooden door open while he did his business?

They came out of the trees and the Ward farm was spread out before them. Arvel's pappy was splitting wood by the house, and his brother Zeke was scattering seed corn for the chickens. Acres of hayfields surrounded them, and the crop garden was rich and green behind the house. There under the bright summer sun, Arvel felt protected.

"I don't see a horse," the Circuit Rider said.

"Sure, it's there in the barn."

"You're lying to me, boy."

Arvel's heart was pumping like water from a spring hose. He threw aside his pole and the basket of fish and broke into a run, screaming like a fresh gelding. Despite the noise in his own head, the Circuit Rider's voice came through clear from the shade of the orchard rows: "Liars go to the devil, boy. Know them by their fruits."

Pappy whipped him for raising a ruckus and startling the live-stock, and Zeke had snickered and teased for days afterward, but Arvel was fine with all that, because he was alive. Still, he knew Harmon Smith never forgot, and the ride never ended. Sooner or later, Arvel would have to own up to his lie. He just hoped it wasn't tonight. Zeke had been taken, but that was an accident, could have happened to anyone. Harmon Smith wasn't the type to rely on old age for stealing souls. No, violence was his way. He'd been taken by violence, and violence was what he had to deliver.

Arvel locked the doors. He should have warned Gordon's new wife and that little girl, no matter how peculiar they were. But they were outsiders. Plus, every fresh victim that stood between Arvel and the Circuit Rider meant a longer wait until his own day of reckoning.

After Mark, Katy had promised herself not to fall for a man, any man. She was on the type of post-divorce arc she'd read about in Cosmopolitan: no dating until a year after the breakup, then dat-ing only nonthreatening men who didn't appeal to her all that much. The Cosmo rule declared no serious relationship could even be contemplated until two years after a divorce, especially if a child was involved. Katy ignored those kinds of rules, though she'd made a promise to herself to be cautious for Jett's sake. Jett, born Jessica, had gotten her nickname because of her inability to make sibilants as a toddler. When Jett had learned of eighties black-clad bad-girl rocker Joan Jett, the name was sealed. Katy had kept Jett away from the potential replacements for Mark, not wanting to parade men through her life. She'd dated a Roger something-or-other, an insurance adjuster with overpowering cologne and happy hands; a broody food columnist for a Charlotte paper who'd nearly had her in tears after just one lunch; and Rudolph Heinz, a tall blond Aryan she'd met in a coffee shop who'd given her a thrilling three weeks but in the end offered about as much mental stimulation as her favorite vibrator. After those ex-periences, part of her was ready to settle down again, but the rest was determined to hold out for the perfect situation.

Gordon changed all that. He was presenting at a conference in the same hotel where Katy's company had scheduled a seminar. Her bank had eschewed frugality and scheduled the event at a re-sort in Asheville, a vibrant community billed as a "gateway to the North Carolina mountains." In the tradition of such seminars, it combined networking with leisure, the kind of professional vaca-tion that most employees endured for the good of their careers while cramming in as much recreation as possible. She'd skipped out of the session entitled "Tax Considerations of Mortgage Points in Refinancing" and was browsing the vending machines by the check-in desk when she saw the schedule for the hotel's other con-ference. Written in red marker on the dry-erase board were the words European Mythology in Appalachian Religion, with a room number and time listed. To Katy, bored nearly to tears and nursing a run high on one thigh of her stockings, the topic evoked images of snake-handling hillbilly preachers crossed with sacrificial burn-ings like the one in the old Christopher Lee film The Wicker Man. She knocked down a quick martini at the hotel's bar and slipped into the small room where she first saw Gordon Smith, who was keynote speaker.

Gordon resembled a slimmer Orson Welles, tall and broad-chested, projecting a vulnerable arrogance. He told the crowd of about twenty, mostly professors who were nursing tenure-track hangovers, about the Scots-Irish influence on Southern Appalachian culture, as well as contributions by the Germans and Dutch. Katy wasn't that inter-ested in the Druids, and religious politics always seemed like an oxymoron to her, so she tuned out most of the speech and planned the evening ahead. The bank had paid for her room, the seminar of-ficially ended before dinner, and she had hours looming with no re-sponsibilities. Jett was staying with her dad, and she'd left her cell phone in her hotel room. She was about as close to free as a single mom could be.

Gordon pulled her from her reverie with a rant on Demeter and Diane, harvest goddesses who had to be appeased before they would prove generous with their human subjects.

"Human sacrifice was common among many primitive reli-gions," Gordon said, his voice assuming an evangelical thunder as if to wake the drowsing audience. "Blood was not only a gift for Diane in the forests of Nemi. Central America, Scandinavia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, India, virtually every continent had bloodthirsty gods, and those gods often demanded the ultimate tribute. Certain Germanic tribes combined human sacrifice with nature worship. If someone was found guilty of scarring the bark of an oak tree, that person's belly button was nailed to the tree trunk, and then the body was circled around the tree until the of-fender's bowels served to patch the tree's wound." Gordon had the audience riveted by then, and Katy found her-self admiring the man's strong cheekbones, thick eyebrows, and dark, penetrating eyes. He went on to suggest that vestiges of the old worship still lived on in the form of scarecrows, horseshoes, jack-o'-lanterns, and Yuletide mistletoe. By the time he'd finished, she'd thought of a question to ask him derived from her own lapsed Catholic beliefs. She waited while he shook the hands of balding, tweed-encased academics, and gave him a smile when her turn came. He nodded impatient, as if he'd earned his honorarium and the show was over.

"Professor Smith, could you tell me how Jesus Christ fits into your theories of human sacrifice?" Gordon first looked startled and then he threw back his head and laughed from deep within his belly.

"My dear, entire books have been written on the subject. Do you have an hour to spare?" His question had not exactly been a come-on, but she didn't want to eat in the hotel dining room alone, or worse, with colleagues from the bank. So she said, "Yes, I do. How about dinner?" She wasn't physically attracted to him, at least not in the rip-off-clothes-and-let's-wallow fashion. Even after their marriage, she questioned her original motivation in seeking him out. But some-where between the oysters and the strawberry cheesecake, he'd be-come interesting for more than just his obvious intelligence. Gordon didn't flinch when she told him she was a divorced mother of one. If anything, he'd become more deferential and inquisitive. By the end of dinner, they agreed to a nightcap at the bar, Katy fully expecting the drinks to lead to an invitation to his room. She didn't have to decide whether she would have accepted the offer, because he never asked. Instead he made her promise to join him for breakfast.

A flurry of communication ensued over the following weeks, phone calls at night, e-mails throughout the day, and even old-fash-ioned, handwritten letters showing up about once a week. It was the letters that eventually won her over. In person, Gordon was a little cool and distant, but his sentences burned with passion and a playful humor that belied his professorial persona. He invited her to visit Solom, and she drove up with Jett one Saturday, her daugh-ter grumbling all the while, dropping into defensive mode over Dad. But Jett had frolicked on the Smith farm, exploring the barn, traipsing through the woods, playing in the creek, and by sundown Jett wanted to stay for another day. By then Katy was prepared to bed the evasive Dr. Smith, but he seemed old-fashioned about courting, reluctant to do more than kiss her cheek.

Katy's decision to accept his proposal came after a few sleep-less weeks of soul-searching. She didn't want a replacement for Mark, especially in Jett's life, but as Mrs. Smith she would be a stay-at-home mother, something she had never desired until Jett's drug problems surfaced. Katy blamed herself for being so ab-sorbed in her career that she let her marriage to Mark fail (though intellectually she knew they'd waltzed together over the cliff edge) and then compounded the error by neglecting Jett. Gordon and Solom offered a fresh start, a chance for her to rebuild her relation-ship with her daughter with a supportive man in her life.

Gordon had never explained Christ's position as the world's most famous sacrificial lamb, but it didn't matter now. The honeymoon was over.

The Blackburn River was old.

Geologists said it was the second-oldest river in the world, after the Amazon. The people in Solom didn't care about history books. All they saw was the slim ribbon of silver that cut into the brown banks of the hilltops. The water brought sustenance in the spring, kept their stock alive in the summer, and in September it shot its narrow cur-rents among the yellow and white stones. It slowed to a trickle in January, only to bust out white again during the March melt. Maybe the water, like the humans who clustered around its shores, had an instinctive understanding of ebb and flow. Solom took its name from bad grammar. Some say the place used to be called Solomon Branch, after the Old Testament king. Others said it was Solomn, a misspelling of the word solemn, which meant everything from formal and serious in a liturgical sense to grave and somber, as in a funeral ceremony. The perma-nent valley settlers had eventually trimmed off the silent letter at the end. If it sounded like Solom, then it was Solom.

The original residents were the buffalo that trampled ruts across the hilltops as they made their way from Kentucky in the summer to the Piedmont flatlands of Carolina in the winter. The herds num-bered in the thousands, and the ground shook as their hooves bit into the earth. The Cherokee and Catawba visited the region only in the fall, when meat was available. Otherwise, the natives had the good sense to stay off those cold and forlorn mountaintops. Then the whites came along and poured across the slopes like albino fire ants.

Daniel Boone and the early European trappers and hunters were cold-blooded enough to hang out on the trails and slaughter their quarry across the seasons, with no sense of a circular food chain. In a few short decades, the buffalo and elk that had sustained the natives for centuries were gone, remembered only in the occa-sional place name or flea-ridden floor skin. The Cherokee had their own problems, driven at gunpoint to Oklahoma, where the land-scape was as alien to them as if they had been dropped onto the surface of Mars. The federal government later felt guilty enough to grant them control of gambling casinos, but by then their heritage and souls had been all but lost. They dreamed of spiritual journeys where they met up with buffalo, but they woke up to an artificially inflated Britney Spears, an artificially inflated Barry Bonds, and a cynical, media-inflated Republican leadership that encouraged fear in every sector of society, especially among the outcast.

Not that modern Solom paid any attention. The inhabitants were mostly the offspring of farm and lumber workers, the women thick and faithful, the men prone to drink when they weren't in church. All were raised with a sense of duty, and church records were often the final statement on the quality of a life lived. A man's obituary was set down by a barely literate family member, and if the man lived a good life, he was noted as a solid provider, a friend of the church and community, and an honest trader. If he failed in any of those areas, his obituary was nothing more than an opportu-nity to question the eventual resting place of his soul.

Women were measured within a narrower yet more sophisti-cated set of parameters. Were her hips broad enough to bear a goodly number of children? Did she sit quietly on her side of church, raising her singing voice only at the appropriate time, after the males had established the proper cadence? Did she keep the Bible on her lap instead of the shelf? Did her obituary list more than a dozen grandchildren?

No obit had ever been written for Harmon Smith, and his name was marked in no family Bible. Many testimonials had once been recorded about the work of Good Harmon Smith, a Methodist minister who had crossed de-nominational lines in the late 1800s, whose horse Old Saint had touched half of three states. A rival minister, the Reverend Duncan Blackburn, had attended to the needs of Episcopalians and the few mountain Catholics. Blackburn had earned a resting place on holy ground while Smith had died on the slopes of what became known as Lost Ridge. Legend held he was on his way to a January bedside appointment with a dying widow when a blizzard swept down from the Canadian tundra and paid his holy debt in full. In the twenty-first century, Blackburn had a line-drawing portrait tucked in the back pages of a university library while Smith occupied graves in three different churchyards. No one knew where Smith's real re-mains were buried.

And some questioned if there were any remains left worth re-turning to the dirt But this was Solom, home of an old river, and questions only came from those who didn't know any better. From outsiders, and newcomers, and those who heard the soft sound of distant twilight hoofbeats.

Chapter Four

Cabbage.

Katy hated the stuff. When cooked, it stank almost as much as swordfish. But Gordon had grown it in the garden, and therefore it achieved all the sacred status of a scapegoat. She could cop out and make slaw, a little mayo, celery seed and paprika and she'd be done. But she wanted Gordon to know she had broken a sweat, and she might accidentally cut her thumb in the bargain and prove her-self a worthy mountain farm wife.

She lifted the heavy knife and was about to snick a fat green-white wedge when the scream pierced the air.

Jett.

Not from upstairs, so it couldn't be Jett.

Outside.

Maybe the cat had gotten a baby rabbit. Katy had been startled by the first bunny scream she'd ever heard on a Sunday morning several weeks back. It was the keening of a raped woman, the grunt of a gutted man, and the mournful wail of an abandoned child all rolled into one. Gordon had chuckled at her leap from the bed. "City girl," he'd admonished.

But Gordon wasn't here and this was no laughing matter.

The scream came again, and this time it did sound like Jett, and it came from the barn, muffled by the chestnut walls.

Time for Supermom without a cape, her uniform stained blue jeans and beige sleeveless blouse instead of blue-and-red tights with a yellow S across her boobs.

She burst onto the porch, raising the knife as if she meant busi-ness.

Katy made a direct line toward the barn, kicking away the dor-mant lilies that had grown around the Smith house for decades. She plowed through the garden, her flip-flops throwing up brown bits of dirt and dead vegetation. The gate was at the end of the driveway, but it was thirty yards out of the way. The fence was right in front of her, sparkling silver in the sunset, but seemed as ephemeral as a spi-derweb. Her heart beat monkey rhythms.

Where was Jett?

She was unaware of leaping the fence, though one foot had probably reached the top strand of hog wire, but she stumbled on the other side, the knife flying from her hand as she fell to her knees. The barn rose before her, a haunted vault of straw and cow manure, as ancient as the family that had erected it. Her daughter, her life, her soul was in there.

She scrambled to her feet and found the knife. Her breath was a sick series of dry heaves in her chest. As she entered the barn, she raised the blade like a talisman.

"Jett?"

No answer, only the wooden echo of her pulse.

The inside of the barn had gone to a bruised shade of purple with sunset. Creeeeeek.

The loft.

She squinted and found the stairs and was halfway to them when a blur of motion came from her left.

"Jett?"

Katy's gasp tasted of dust. She stepped back as the body fell from above, its arms flailing in the half-light, the waist bent at an obscene angle. She cringed, waiting for it to fall in a splintering heap of bones on the crooked steps. Instead, the body bounced and sprawled on the dirt floor at her feet. She jumped away, slamming her back into a locust support beam.

The body was too large to be Jett's. It was facedown, the limbs askew. Katy waited for breathing or a wheeze of pain to come from the twisted figure. After a few moments of silence, she eased for-ward and nudged the body with her toe. It moved with a rodent rus-tle, too light to be flesh and bone. Katy knelt and touched the flannel of the shirt, then lifted the head. Straw spilled from a split seam in the clothing. It was a scare-crow, mildewed and ragged. Her ascent up the stairs must have dis-lodged it from its seasonal slumber dangling from a rusty nail. A length of braided hemp rope was tied in a noose around its neck, the top end frayed. The head was wrapped in cheesecloth, with pale bone buttons for eyes and a piece of black yarn for a mouth. Its straw planter's hat had rolled away, a jagged crescent torn in the brim as if some animal had taken a big bite.

Maybe Jett had seen the scarecrow and thought it was a person and freaked out, just as Katy had done. After all, Gordon had told her the legend, too, and Jett's face had gone pale while listening, making her black eye shadow even more dramatic.

But there were worse things than legends. Like drugs. What if Jett had scored some angel dust or crystal meth, something that turned reality into a rocket ride down a nightmare chute to hell?

"Jett?"

Footsteps drummed on the loft floor above. Boots, too heavy to be Jett's ankle-high black leather things.

Katy mounted the steps, glancing at the four chicken-wired windows on the lower floor, wishing more of the fading sunlight would pour through and burn her fear away. But she had little room for fear, because worry took over. At the top of the stairs, she eased up the little metal hasp that kept the door fastened. She'd never been in the loft, and had only briefly visited the barn during Gordon's introductory tour.

Too bad she wasn't Supermom for real. X-ray vision would come in handy right now. The light was a little better up here, thanks to the large triangles cut into each end of the barn. Uneven squares of dirty blond hay were stacked around like an autistic giant's alphabet blocks. Stalks of tobacco dangled upside down at the far end of the barn, speared on poles, the drying leaves like the wings of reddish brown bats. Could Jett be playing some bizarre game of hide-and-seek? She wasn't the type to scream. If Jett wanted to get attention, she usu-ally came up with some mind-blowing observation or another. But Katy had been neglecting Jett in favor of Gordon lately, even though Jett's world had been shaken more than anyone's by the move to Solom.

"Okay, Jett," she said. "Fun's over. Come on out."

She heard a giggle, or maybe it was only a breeze rifling the parched tobacco.

"Dinner's probably burning," Katy said. "If you thought the swordfish was bad wait until you smell scorched cabbage."

Katy felt silly holding the knife, so she rucked it behind her back as she headed between the rows of hay. The air was as thick as snuff, motes spinning in the shafts of dying sunlight. A few loose piles of hay were scattered here and there, near the black square holes in the floor through which food was thrown down to the ani-mals. Katy expected Jett to jump from behind a stack at any mo-ment, or burst up from one of the hay piles in a sneeze-inducing spray of gold. Good prank, except that would spoil dinner. She wanted Gordon in a good mood so maybe they could finally finish consummating their marriage.

"Cute, honey. We can have a good laugh over the dinner table." No answer. The time Jett had taken acid in Charlotte, she'd stayed out all night, hiding in a storm sewage pipe, showing up late for school the next day, dirty, wild-eyed and ravaged by insects. Katy, who had waited up sleepless and had several times resisted the urge to call the police, had picked her up from school, taken her to the doctor, and let the school psychologist give the lecture. Something in Jett had changed after that, a drifting look in her eyes, a secretive smile that spoke of more journeys to come. Hopefully this wasn't one of them.

Katy made her way through the maze of bales to the far end of me barn. She looked through the triangle to the wooded hills above. A few goats dotted the slopes, browsing in the brush at the edge of the forest. In the adjacent meadow, separated by a stitch of fencing, cows worked the grass, their heads swiveling, ears twitching against the insects. She was about to turn back to explore the loft again when a light flickered in the distant trees.

Somebody with a lantern or flashlight. The ridge was Gordon's property. It was nearly hunting season, but Gordon's land was posted. Gordon said his neighbors were always welcome, as long as no bullets flew around and no drunken hunters mistook his cows for oversize deer. She'd have to tell him about the trespassing later, when such ordinary oddities would matter.

"Jett, seriously. Don't make me get mad." She tapped the knife against a post. "The scarecrow trick was a good one. Spooked the living daylights out of me. I bet you can't wait to tell Gordon." No answer. Maybe Jett had already slipped down the stairs and was waiting at the dinner table, or in her room, cheeks swollen with the laughter she was storing up. At any rate, Jett was twelve and could find her way to the house with no trouble, even in the dark. Even stoned out of her eyeballs. But that scream—

It hadn't sounded like a joke.

If there had even been a scream. Maybe, like the perfume in the kitchen or the footsteps that had no legs, the scream had been noth-ing more than invisible smoke. The farm wasn't haunted. Despite the way Gordon's first wife had died.

This was silly. Jett had promised to quit drugs as part of their new life. If a mother and daughter couldn't trust each other, they were hopeless anyway. Katy decided she would check on dinner, and if she didn't see Jett in the house, she would grab a flashlight and return. Without the knife.

"Okay, Jett," she yelled, her words stifled by the hay. "I'm going back to the house." The lower floor of the barn was darker as she descended the stairs. The air was as cool as a cellar. A soft, moist sighing arose from the packed floor. She swallowed hard and took another step, nearly slipping to fall alongside the prone scarecrow. Something large and pale moved in the shadows, and Katy tightened her grip on the knife.

Damn Gordon and his mountain legends. The one about the haunted scarecrow, in particular. About how it only walked at late harvest, when the corn was turning hard and brown and the first frosts settled on the land. According to legend, the Scarecrow climbed down from the stake where it had hung all growing season like a neglected Christ on the cross. Then it dragged itself into the barn, where it feasted on one of the animals, filling its dry throat with fresh blood. Sustained until winter, the scarecrow then re-turned to its stake, though on moonlit nights you might see rusty red spots on its sackcloth head. Gordon's eyes glistened as he'd told the story, and Katy had given the uneasy laugh he expected in response.

This was the right time of year. And the scarecrow that had fallen at her feet looked just like the one that leaned broken and sad in the cornfield at the end of the vegetable garden. No. That was just a mountain folk tale. Not a wives' tale, be-cause no wife would be so stupid as to pass along a story like that. Katy could come up with a rational explanation. Holder of a busi-ness degree from Queen's College, assistant to the board of direc-tors at Wachovia Bank, she was made of stern stuff. Almost boring bat ultimately practical.

So think.

Surely a big farm like this one had several scarecrows. Gordon's family had probably saved them, the same way frugal farm fami-lies had always hoarded things that could be used again. Besides, it was just a sack of straw. Flannel and old denim and straps. No matter the legends.

The dim outline of the scarecrow made a lesser darkness on the floor, the gray socks of the feet poking out of the jeans, gloves at the end of each sleeve. The left sock, the one closest to her, twitched. The wind, had to be. Except the air was as still as sundown.

Katy put out her own foot, meaning to kick the sock in case a frantic mouse was inside and upset that its nest had been disturbed. The straw toes flexed and curled, and then the foot kicked back at her. The scarecrow would rise to its elbows and knees and haul itself off to eat a chicken or pig or maybe even a cow, ready to gnaw with those teeth—what would its teeth be?—kernels of giant, hardened corn, piercing flesh and grinding bone and—

The boots sounded above her again.

She hadn't imagined them. Despite her hallucinations in the house, she wasn't losing her mind. Scarecrows didn't move by themselves and her new house wasn't haunted. Never mind Gordon's goddamned legends.

Crumbs of straw fell in a snow between the cracks in the floor-ing planks above. Someone was up there for real.

The barn door beckoned. Twenty steps and Katy would be out of there, away from animated scarecrows and footfalls and de-mented goats.

And away from Jett.

Katy paused heart like a horseshoe in her throat.

She couldn't leave Jett here.

If Jett even was here.

The barn had grown darker, the sun settling behind the trees on the ridgeline, fingers of deep red light reaching across the valley. The footsteps above had ceased. Katy's palm was a wooden knot around the knife handle. What good would a knife do against an animated scarecrow? Even if she shredded the cloth, dug into the chest, and found the rag-ball heart, would that even slow it down? Or would it keep crawling, rubbing against her, choking her with its chaff, that uneven grin never changing?

A knock came from one of the stalls. It was soft but insistent, like the hammering of a dying rain.

"Jett!"

Katy hoped to God Jett was back in the house. Even if the house was haunted it couldn't be worse than this hell-shack of a barn. Katy backed away from the scarecrow twitching before her. Hallucinations and fleeting visions were one thing, and maybe a transparent woman walked the Smith house, but now she was deal-ing with a stack of rags and silage that did everything but talk. Katy backed away, but the thumping in the stall was behind her. Whatever was making the sound couldn't be worse than the scare-crow. It had stopped moving, but she was sure it was holding its breath, waiting for her to come closer, tensing its fibrous muscles and licking its corn-kernel teeth with a parched tongue.

She turned and made for the stairs. Maybe if she reached the loft, she could signal Jett and tell her to go for help. Except what kind of help was there against a living scarecrow? Calling Ghostbusters and requesting a smarmy Bill Murray and his team to take the next flight down?

Gordon would be home any minute. He would know some mountain saying or folk spell to cast on the scarecrow, a secret passed down through the generations. That was the way these things worked, wasn't it? Evil countered by a good and courageous heart?

But if those were the weapons, what chance did Katy have? Her own heart was dormant, and besides her feelings for Jett, hadn't been used much in the last few years. She loved Gordon, but was no longer sure what the L-word meant. She couldn't really love God because of all the things he had visited upon her, but she was try-ing hard for Gordon's sake. But if Gordon, or God, or even Bill Murray, could get her out of this barn, she would be his emotional slave until the end of time. The stall door opened to her right, and Abraham the goat emerged from the inky depths, his eyes glittering. He ignored Katy and went straight toward the scarecrow. The wad of dead vegeta-tion probably smelled like a gourmet feast to the goat. Katy climbed three steps, stopping on a warped tread to watch the en-counter.

The scarecrow regarded the goat with something approaching curiosity, as much as that expression could be suggested by the blank, stitched-up face. Ascribing human characteristics to the face was nothing more than projection, but Katy couldn't help it. She had seen its foot move. She'd heard the legends.

Abraham's nostrils flared; then he lowered his head and ap-proached the scarecrow, the horns curled flat against his skull but still menacing. Twenty feet separated the two creatures—a little voice inside Katy admitted she had already accepted the scarecrow as an organic part of this strange, ancient world of Solom—when the boots sounded upstairs again.

"Jett?"

Please, God, let her be safe in the house.

Except why should God listen to Katy?

Abraham reached the scarecrow, which lay still and prone like a willing sacrament. The billy goat sniffed at the stuffed sock, lowered its bearded chin, and nudged the toes. Katy expected the scarecrow to kick out, to sit up and dig its teeth into the furry neck. Instead, Abraham clamped his teeth onto the sock and tugged lift-ing the sock free, showering straw across the ground. It was just a stupid goddamned scarecrow.

Katy was angry at herself for wasting the last moments of day-light letting her mind run wild. What if a stoned-out Jett had wan-dered off into the woods? Maybe that light in the forest had belonged to her, maybe she had taken a flashlight and run away from home. In Charlotte, she would head straight for Deidre's house, or the video arcade at the mall, or one of the music stores, to chill out until the drugs wore off. Here in the country, the only place to run was into the woods. That didn't change the fact that someone was in the barn. Unless it, like the house, was haunted. She went up the stairs to the loft door. It was locked. Had she slipped the latch herself, as she'd exited? She couldn't remember. Below her, Abraham ate the scarecrow's meat with a satisfied chuff. Katy entered the loft again, determined not to leave until she'd found the owner of the boots, if one existed. The loft wasn't as dark as the space below, but the shadows between the stacked bales had grown deeper. The knife was heavy in her hand and her muscles ached with tension. A charred and pungent odor wended past, and she recognized it as scorched cabbage. She would probably burn the house down. Gordon would be livid. The structure had survived nearly two hundred years of Smiths and Katy would manage to raze it in less than two months.

"Okay, whoever you are," Katy called out, giving her words force to hide the tremor in her throat. Supermom, that was she. "My husband's on his way."

If the trespasser was familiar with Gordon, which was likely, he might not be intimidated by the pudgy professor's wrath. But the jerk might know Gordon's habits, too, and that he rarely arrived home before dark. He would know Katy and Jett were by them-selves and the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. So Katy added, "I called the sheriff's office."

Something thumped, the sound muffled by the piles of hay. A patch of lesser gray shifted against the darkness. Katy swallowed hard.

The boots drummed, or maybe it was Katy's heart.

The shape charged her in a shower of dust and straw.

Katy raised the knife, her scream reverberating off the tin roof-ing like stage thunder in a theater. The goat stopped in front of her, head lifted the oblique eyes gathering the faint light and reflecting it in emerald streaks.

A goat.

A goddamned goat had been walking around up here, scaring the stuffing out of her. It must have smelled the hay, climbed up the stairs, and gotten itself locked in.

But who had locked the door?

Katy was on her way to the stairs again when she heard the moan. A barn owl?

No. It came from inside one of the wooden grain barrels that stood near a feed chute. What sort of animal would she find in there? A wounded possum or a feral cat giving birth?

How could she not look?

Jett was curled inside, arms folded over her face.

"Jett, honey," Katy said. She sniffed for dope but it could have been something taken internally. Jett's eyes were bloodshot but, even in the weak light, her pupils appeared normal. "Honey, what happened?" The girl's mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, her face like a ghost's in the blackness of the barrel. She blinked and looked around as if she'd fallen asleep on a car trip. "Where am I?"

"The barn."

"Where am I?"

Drugs. Katy thought they'd left all that behind and that drugs would be impossible for Jett to find in the rural mountains.

"You're in the barn, Jett." She would save the mother-daughter talk for later, maybe bring Gordon into the act. Gordon wasn't yet a potent father figure, but he knew how to lecture. Right now, she wanted to get Jett in the house so she could check her pulse.

"There was a man..." Jett said.

"No, there's nobody up here. Just a goat. I looked. How did you get in the barrel?"

"I don't remember."

The nanny goat, its belly swollen with pregnancy, came over and watched as Katy pulled Jett from the barrel and helped her down the stairs.

Chapter Five

Mouse doodie.

Sarah Jeffers ran her broom along the baseboard of the counter. The counter stood by the front door of Solom General Store and was dark maple, the top scarred by two million transactions. Most of the lights were turned off for closing time, and the dolls, tools, mountain crafts, and just plain junk that hung from the ceiling beams threw long shadows against the walls. After all her years as proprietor, the aroma of tobacco, woodstove smoke, Dr Pepper, and shoe polish had seeped into her skin like balm. The store had been built during the town's heyday just before World War I, when the timber industry made its assault on the local hardwoods. The train station had been a bustling place, bringing Sarah's grandparents to the mountains from Pennsylvania. The Jeffers, who had once gone by the family name of Jaffe, built the store from the ground up, collecting the creek stones for the foun-dation, trading and bartering for stock, even breeding their own workforce. They were Jewish but no one paid that any mind, be-cause they kept closed services in their living room and the store remained open on both Saturdays and Sundays.

When the forest slopes were nothing but stumps and the timber cutters moved on, the sawmill shut down. After that, it was like the hands ran backward on the clock. The earthen dam slowly eroded on Blackburn River, and the little housing settlement that sprang up around the mill began succumbing to the gray and ceaseless weight of gravity. Though the first Fords had made occasional visits over the dusty mountain roads, mostly driven by lumber barons who wanted to check on their investments, the town's slow exodus was almost entirely via horse-and-wagon. By the Great Depression, Solom was little more than a whistle stop on the Virginia Creeper railroad line. Then came the great 1940 flood, sweeping away the station and a third of the remaining houses, killing a dozen people in the process. Sarah's grandparents died within weeks of one another, and the three children fought over who had to stay and run the store. The short straw belonged to Sarah's father, Elisha, who promptly took on a Primitive Baptist wife, Laurel Lee, because she knew addition and subtraction and silence. Through it all the general store stood on its little rise above the river, the stock changing with the times. Chesterfield tobacco pouches and Bugler papers gave way to Marlboro tailor-mades, horehound stick candy disappeared from the shelves in favor of Baby Ruths. A Sears & Roebuck catalog by the register once allowed a mountain family to order practically anything a New York city slicker could buy, but that had been re-placed by a computer during the Clinton era. Sarah didn't trust it, had even named it "Slick Willy" and suspected it of swallowing a dollar once in a while, and the screen stayed black unless Gretta, the thick-ankled college student who worked part-time, was on the clock. The computer was one of the few modern touches, besides the sheer volume of cheap imported crafts designed to look folksy. The wall adornments—rusty advertising signs, farm implements, and shelves of old ripple glass bottles—furthered the illusion that the general store was lost in time, a nostalgic reminder of more carefree days. Sarah didn't buy the illusion, but she sold it. Times were better raking in leisure dollars than dunning the local folks for nickels.

Sarah had grown up in the store, dusting the shelves and tally-ing pickled eggs in her plain cotton shift. She remembered when the store's first indoor toilet was installed, and though as a four-year-old she'd had a great fear of the roaring flush of water, shed had an even greater fear of hanging her bare bottom over that stinky black hole in the outhouse. Even back then, she'd pushed a broom, and had asked her mother about the numerous little black needles amid the stray hair, spilled sugar, dried grass, and dirt.

"Mouse doodie," Laurel Lee had said. "A mouse goes to heaven in a country store." Sarah had always thought of those mice as happy, blessed crea-tures, scurrying under the floorboards, worrying their way through sacks of feed grain, chewing into the corners of cornflake boxes. But after nearly seventy years of sweeping up their damned doodie, she was about ready to wish them to a Baptist hell.

But at least the mice gave her something to blame when strange sounds echoed through the aisles. She didn't like being in the store alone, but she could barely afford her two part-time helpers. So she'd spent the past decades running the broom, ignoring the evi-dence of her ears, and not thinking about the scarecrow man.

The bell over me screen door rang. It was ten minutes after seven, past closing time, but she hadn't locked the door. The porch light bathed the deck in yellow light, and Sarah squinted against it at the bulky shadow.

"Howdy," she said. It was still tourist season in the mountains, though the Floridians and New Yorkers were usually tucked away in their Titusville hotel rooms by now, afraid of getting a mosquito bite, or else squirreled away in their Happy Hollow rental cabins at $150 a night. The kayak and rafting trade from Sue Norwood's lit-tle shop had boomed a little along the river, helping me general store keep its head above water. Seemed like every time the busi-ness wanted to sink down to the sandy bottom and take a nice, long nap, some moneymaking scheme came along and dragged it back to the surface for another gasp.

The shadow stood in the door, hands in pockets, the head ob-scured by an outdated hat with a wide brim. All Sarah wanted was to get a little of his money and send him on his way in time for the latest rerun of Seinfeld, delivered via her little satellite dish.

"Can I get you something?" she said, glad to be shut of mouse doodie for the moment. Her voice had developed a mountain twang over the years, partly unconsciously and partly to help sell the illusion. The figure shuffled forward. People in these parts, even the vis-itors, usually answered when addressed. But occasionally a creep came through looking for the best place in the neighborhood for fast money. She did a mental calculation, figured she had maybe eighty bucks in the register. Worth killing somebody over, these days.

Sarah leaned her broom against the counter, flicking her eyes toward the shotgun she kept on the second shelf beneath the regis-ter. The shotgun was well oiled but hadn't been fired in twenty years. Currently it was covered by stacks of the High Country News, a free weekly that was such wretched oatmeal she couldn't give it away. She'd hidden the newspapers, not wanting to disap-point the friendly young man with the crew cut who delivered them early Thursday mornings. She figured there were at least two months of bad copy between her and the firearm.

She'd have to talk her way out of this one. "Got a special on canned ham," she said. "Nine dollars. Let the missus take an evening off from the kitchen."

Nothing, not even a grunt. The man was three steps inside. She wished she'd left more lights on. It was the electrical cooperative's fault. In her father's day, the Blackburn dam had a generator, cranking out enough juice to light up the store and two dozen homes. Then the co-op came in and hooked five counties together, and you had to be on the grid or off, no in between. After that, the power bill had gotten higher every month.

Sarah could make out the man's form now, the collar of his coat turned up even though the fall had yet to turn chilly. The front brim of the hat was angled down, keeping the face in shadows. The stranger stood there, his breath like the whistle of a distant train. Something creaked in the hardware section, in the back cor-ner of the store that Sarah avoided after sundown. Things went wrong in that corner: alakaline batteries leaked boxes of nails busted open for no good reason, the fingers of work gloves some-how grew holes. Her father had sold guns, and the ammunition used to be locked away in that corner, but one afternoon some of the bullets somehow got hot and exploded, sending lead fragments whizzing over the heads of the customers. Sarah wished for a magic bullet right now, one that would knock the stranger's hat off his head.

Because the hat didn't belong.

"Your first trip to Solom?" Sarah said, keeping her voice steady. She eased toward the counter, closer to the register and the shot-gun. She'd been driving some tacks into the shelf so she could hang her metal signs, the ones that said a bad day of fishing beats a good day of work and I ain't old, I'm just experienced. She leaned on the counter with one elbow, her other arm reaching for the hammer. It felt good in her hand.

"You staying up at the Tester B-and-B?" she asked the mute man. "Or the Happy Hollow cabins?" Sarah brought the hammer closer to her hip, imagining its arc as she brought it into the dark, unseen face. Her lips creased into the tired, welcoming smile she gave to first-time customers, an expres-sion meant to elicit pity and a desire to help out a little old lady by giving her money. "You ain't from around here, are you?"

The stranger stepped into the light, lifted his hat, and smiled. "Once I was," he said, in a voice as patient as a river and as deep as a subterranean cavern. "But that was a while back." Sarah dropped the hammer, nearly breaking her big toe.

Jett didn't have an appetite, so Katy put her to bed early after checking for signs of drug use. Her daughter's respiration and pulse were slightly elevated, but that could have been from the fright. Jett's eyes weren't bloodshot but were wild and frantic, and they kept flicking toward the corners of her room and the closet door.

"He was tall," Jett said. "Wearing black, with an old hat."

"Let's talk about this after supper, honey."

"Can I leave my light on? Please?"

"Sure."

Jett had never been afraid of the dark, not since the age of three. Katy felt guilty for leaving her upstairs, but she had to salvage din-ner before Gordon arrived. She was reluctant to tell Gordon about the incident. As conservative as he was, he would want to search Jett's room. It was a showdown in which everybody would lose. Besides, Jett said she had quit drugs, and Katy gave her daughter the benefit of a doubt. People changed, and they changed a lot faster when they were new and still learning to be people.

Suppose there had been a man dressed in black? Katy had heard the boots walking on the loft floor, and they'd sounded much louder than goat's hooves. She didn't want to think about it. A goat made more sense than a stranger in black. Odus Hampton wouldn't have skulked around, he would have called out in his friendly but deferential voice.

"Why don't you read something?" Katy said going to the book-shelf. "How about a comic book?

'Sandman.' That sounds like it could put you to sleep."

"Mom, you're so out of it."

"Music, then?" She scanned the row of CDs. Jett had raided Katy's collection and plucked some of the most rebellious titles. Here was Patti Smith, the manic street preacher warning people away from the golden stairs of heaven. Kate Bush, a reclusive ge-nius whose voice could seduce and excoriate in the same breath. Siouxsie and her Banshees, who smothered you with sonic layers that were as sweet as funeral flowers. The Psychedelic Furs with their manic saxes and dismal lyrics. Jett had some newer music that Katy was unfamiliar with, Angelfish and Bella Morte.

Katy knew what it was like to be twelve. She'd been there once, and not so long ago. Decadence and doom seemed like perfectly reasonable pursuits for a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, as long as it was confined to the realm of rock 'n' roll. But, in a quirk that secretly pleased Katy, her daughter had also sneaked a lot of upbeat guitar pop out of Katy's collection: the Replacements, dBs, Let's Active, Tommy Keene, and Robyn Hitchcock.

"I just want to lay here and think," Jett said.

" 'Lie here,' " Katy corrected.

"Yeah, I was going to say that, but I'm not lying. I really saw him." Katy sat down on the edge of the bed and felt Jett's forehead. Clammy, no sign of a fever. "Okay, we'll see about whether you're up to school tomorrow."

I want to go to school."

"New friends, huh? A guy?"

Jett twisted her lips into a "yuck," but her eyes narrowed into a secretive expression. Without her dramatic eyeliner and face pow-der, Jett looked innocent and girlish. Her careworn teddy bear, Captain Boo, was tucked against her chin. If only those who judged her by her boots and chains and dyed hair with the purple streak could see her like this, Katy thought, maybe they'd give her a break. Like that would ever happen. Katy had a hard enough time keeping Gordon off Jett's case, which had nearly been a deal-breaker after his sudden proposal. It was only after Gordon agreed to give it some time and let Jett deal with the transition in her own way that Katy accepted. Jett even admitted she wasn't a serious Goth. Hers was more an act, a Goth Lite traveling show that would have been tiresome to her if it didn't upset some people so much.

That was the part Katy understood and supported. Despite her former career as a loan officer, very little else about her was ordi-nary. She'd always had an unhealthy self-image, the scrawny red-head with freckles, and she'd compensated by going out of her way to be a "somebody" in school. Sometimes that meant beating out a girl on the volleyball or cheerleading squad, and a couple of times she'd resorted to stealing one of the more popular girls' boyfriends. Because she considered herself unattractive, she had to engage in behavior that was a little more extreme than that of her competi-tors. So she could cut her daughter some slack. Besides, Katy wasn't exactly jumping into her new role as farm wife as if it were a sec-ond skin, despite a newfound fondness for Smith family recipes. She pulled the blankets up and kissed Jett's forehead. She thought about asking if Jett wanted to say a prayer, then realized how phony that would sound. Jett would shoot her down by asking how come they never prayed in Charlotte. And, she'd add, what was so freaking great about Solom that deserved special thanks?

"I'll come up after supper and check on you," Katy said. "Or you can come down if you feel up to it." Jett turned to face the window, hugging Captain Boo tightly. "I'll be here. Unless he comes to get me again."

"Honey."

"Never mind."

Katy rose from the bed. If she had the guts, she would tell her daughter about the mysterious figure she'd seen in the kitchen, the wispy form that had vanished in the pantry. But Katy wasn't ready to admit that the vision was real. No footsteps had sounded on the stairs when she was home alone, and the sudden scent of lilacs hadn't drifted across the kitchen whenever she performed a domes-tic task. This was an old house, that was all, settling wood and seeped-in aromas. Maybe she'd leave her own mark for the next generation: blackened cabbage and funky salmon.

"If it really was a man, Gordon will probably know him," Katy said, not quite believing her own words.

"He'll know what to do."

"

Sure, Mom." Jett didn't believe her at all. "love you."

"Love you too." Sounded like she almost meant it.

Katy went downstairs into the kitchen, where she scraped the cabbage into the garbage. Perhaps she should dump the mess out-side, but she wanted to get something on me table before Gordon showed up. She rummaged in the fridge, then with a sigh retreated to the safety of the freezer and a microwave TV

dinner. Gordon's first wife, Rebecca, had never used a microwave, and Katy sus-pected the one she brought from her Charlotte apartment was the first to ever emit radiation in this house. Perhaps this meal was an affront to the generations of Smiths who had gone before.

"Get used to it," Katy said.

Something crashed in the pantry.

"Wonderful." She punched up the proper cook time on the key-pad of the microwave. She couldn't handle cabbage but she was magic with instant meals.

With the microwave whirring behind her, she went to the pantry and pulled back the curtain. The aroma of lilacs was so strong it was like a slap in the face. Rows and rows of Mason jars lined the shelves, containing raspberry preserves, chow chow, sauerkraut, and a dozen other goods all expertly canned by Gordon's first wife. Enough to last a nuclear winter.

On the floor, juice leaking from shards of curved and gleaming glass, was a jar of pickles. Broken like the spaghetti sauce. As Katy knelt to pick up the largest pieces, she felt the curtain stir behind her, as if someone was through with business in the pantry and had chores elsewhere. Jett listened to Mom banging around in the kitchen. She tried to muster a little sympathy, because Mom was trying to be some kind of trophy wife and didn't have the sense to recognize it just wasn't in her blood. Mom had just been plain uncool lately, a slave to the kitchen, fussing over the house, keeping dirty laundry off the floor. All to please Gordon, a man who wouldn't notice his slippers were on fire unless somebody turned a hose on him.

She tugged her Walkman from the lower shelf of her bedside table. She almost wished she had a joint. That would go over well with the Cure whispering through the headphones, Robert Smith going on about how he couldn't find himself even when he was in love with someone happy and young. No wonder, he should ditch the "happy" part and find a real woman. Jett would gladly volun-teer. After all, Jett was a drug-addict loser who had finally gone so far over the edge she was imagining mystical encounters with giant scarecrow men. If she had been stoned, she could have laughed it off. But she had promised Mom that drugs were a thing of the past, a habit left in Charlotte, and she was determined to keep the promise. If Mom could change, so could Jett. Though it looked like neither of them were changing for the better.

The front door closed downstairs, and over the guitar solo she heard Gordon's belly-deep professor's voice delivering his stan-dard catch phrase. "Where are my favorite girls?" Jett wormed deeper beneath the blankets. Gordon never entered her room after she was in bed thank goodness. That was one ad-vantage of his being a religious guy. He had some weird Old Testament code that kept women in their place but also placed them on an altar. Mom had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. After Dad's neglect, any sort of attention was a cause of mindless joy for her. Not that Dad was a bad guy. He just had his own fuck-ing shit to deal with, truckloads of it, and Jett wished she could call him right now. She needed somebody real to talk to, somebody who would understand about stupid scarecrow men.

But what would she tell him? She couldn't really remember. The whole thing in the barn seemed like a bad acid trip, and Jett knew about acid because she'd dropped it a second time at Melissa Sanderson's fourteenth birthday party. She'd spent the whole night hiding under Melissa's bed, talking to the dust bunnies. The weird-est thing was that the dust bunnies had talked back, and they even acted like bunnies, hopping around, frolicking, twitching their lit-tle whiskers. But that was a lifetime ago and a whole other person. That had been a stupid, skinny kid trying to fit in with the crowd. Now she was trying to fit out of the crowd.

She cranked the Cure up to full volume and put the blanket over her head so Mom would think she was asleep. She wouldn't sleep. She didn't dare. Because, if she closed her eyes, she might see the tall, dark man with the sickle.

Somehow, morning came just the same.

Chapter Six

Ray Tester pressed the lever beneath the fuel control of his Massey Ferguson, raising the hydraulic arms at the Tear of the trac-tor. The arms held a bush hog, an oversize lawn mower attachment that hacked meadows into hay. Ray only had ten acres, the smallest of the parcels that had been divided among the family when Zachariah Tester died. Old Zack had been the preacher at Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church, a position now held by David Tester, Ray's oldest brother. David had gotten sixty acres in the will and Ray's attendance at the church had been spotty ever since, mostly funerals, weddings, and whenever some good home-baked pies were being served.

Ray surveyed the slain grass behind him. The signs called for dry weather, and if the rain held off for five days, Ray could get the hay rolled and stacked safely in the shed. He had a dozen head of cattle, but the way people were breeding goats up here, he might be better off culling his herd and paying his property tax bill by sell-ing hay. He could understand the temptation to raise goats over cows: goats preferred to browse instead of graze, so you could turn them loose in the woods and they did gangbusters. They didn't mind a steep slope, either.

On the downside, and Ray had learned there was always a downside when it came to farming, goat meat was like a gamier version of venison and you'd never find it served up at McDonald's. Some of the organic farmers that had settled in Solom over the last decade had taken to milking goats. A nanny raised holy hell if you didn't tug her teats twice a day, the yield wasn't all that hot, and unless you were squeezing the milk into cheese, you had to hustle it off to market in Asheville or Charlotte. Both of those cities were full of queers and Asheville in particular was known to harbor witches, so as far as Ray was concerned the organic hippies could keep that little business.

Ray wiped the sweat from his bald head. A Cadillac passed on the road white as a virgin, with tinted windows and tires wide enough to roll out pizza dough. Damned tourist. Ray thought about flipping a finger, but Sarah down at the general store had lectured him on how outside money was good stuff. Yankees with summer homes paid the county plenty in taxes but didn't require many ser-vices, since they were only down here two or three months a year. Still, a Yankee was a fucking Yankee, and the invasion that had started in the War Between the States with General Bill Stoneman and finished up with Sherman had never really ended just changed tactics. Instead of cavalry and carpetbaggers, New York sent its de-velopers and architects and their scrawny, pale wives.

But the driver of that heavy-assed hunk of steel was probably spending money down at Sarah's, and she was as sweet as sugar-cane, so Ray lifted his hand in a halfhearted wave. Tourists liked that sort of thing, the farmer in his field a simple picture hearken-ing back to a simpler time. Wasn't nothing simple about it. You couldn't barter for what you needed anymore, and the government had gotten bigger every year, despite the Republican takeover of the South. Ray could sell down at the farmers' market in Boone and pocket some tax-free income, but he also had to be on the Agricultural Extension Office books so he could get his handout when the government decided to subsidize some crop or another. The Cadillac disappeared around the curve and Ray turned the tractor for another pass. He lowered the bush hog and the thick blade cut into the clover, dandelion, rye, and sour grass. The green scent filled his nostrils. A horsefly landed on the back of his neck and he swiped at it. The fly lifted and settled again just above his ear. Ray slapped again, twisting his neck, so he wasn't watching as his tractor hit a hump, causing the front tires to bounce. Ray's left foot reached for the clutch but the back tires had already rolled over the same hump. The bush hog blade made a whining noise, and Ray looked back to see a stream of dark liquid spew from be-neath the protective metal shield.

"Shit fire," he said, disengaging the tractor's transmission and throwing the PTO into neutral, stopping the blade. He set the hand brake and got down from the seat. Sometimes you hit a nest of rab-bits in a hayfield. Once, Ray had accidentally chopped up a fawn. If a doe left her fawn, the fawn would remain at that spot until the mother came back, no matter what, even if a giant, smoke-spitting mountain of steel was heading for it. But this was no bunny and no fawn.

Four goats, their heads gone, their carcasses ripped with red gashes.

Somebody had slaughtered them and tossed their bodies into the knee-high grass. Somebody who wasn't interested in goat burger or rank cheese.

Ray killed the Massey Ferguson's engine and leaned against a rear tire, watching the flies swarm around their decaying feast. The first buzzard appeared in the sky, its black wings buffeted by the high September wind.

Hippies. Had to be. Or Yankees, maybe. Who else would kill a damned goat for no good reason?

Though Ray saw no use in the stubborn critters, he wouldn't kill them on purpose. He was raised to kill only for food, anyway.

This was the work of somebody with no respect for the moun-tains, for the ways of the farm, for life. A person who pulled some-thing like this didn't belong in the valley. Solom had always taken care of itself, even if outsiders had started buying up the land. And Ray was sure that, one way or another, Solom would take care of whatever disrespectful trash had done this messy deed. Maters.

Those blessed maters were going to be the death of her.

Betsy Ward had canned, stewed frozen, and dried about thirty pounds of those red, ugly things. The blight had hit hard because of the wet summer, and the first frosts had killed the plants, but her husband, Arvel, had brought in a double armload just before the big autumn die-off. Now tomatoes sat in rows across the windowsill, along the counter, and on the pantry shelves, turning from green to pink to full sinful red, with the occasional leaking black spot. The thing about tomatoes was that no bug or cutworm would attack them. The plants were as poison as belladonna, and bugs were smart enough to know that maters would kill you. But people were a lot dumber than bugs.

Betsy wiped the sweat away with a dirty towel. She had been born in Solom, and had even gone off the mountain for a year to at-tend community college. She'd wanted to be a typist then, maybe get on with Westridge University and draw vacation and retire-ment. But Arvel had come along with his pickup and Doc Watson tapes and rusty mufflers and he'd seemed like the Truth for a nine-teen-year-old mountain girl, and then one night he forgot the rub-ber and nine months later they were married and the baby came out with the cord wrapped around its neck and they had tried a few times after that, but now all they had was a long piece of property and a garden and so many tomatoes that Betsy wanted to grab Arvel's shotgun and blow them all into puree.

She looked out the window and saw Gordon Smith's new wife checking the mailbox. The woman had that big-city, washed-out look, as if she couldn't wander into daylight without a full plate of makeup. Still, she seemed harmless enough, and not as standoffish as the other outsiders who had flooded the valley since Betsy's knee-high days. And Betsy was sick to death of her kitchen, any-way. She flicked the seeds from her fingers and headed for the door, determined to greet her new neighbor. Four mailboxes stood at the mouth of the gravel drive. Arvel's place was the closest to the highway, followed by Gordon's, then by a fellow Betsy had never met, though she'd peeked in his mailbox once and learned that his name was Alex Eakins. A young woman drove by to visit him about once a week or so, probably up to for-nication and other sins.

"Howdy," Betsy called from the porch.

The redhead looked up from the box where she had been thumbing through a stack of envelopes. Her eyes were bloodshot. Betsy wondered if she was a drinker, then decided a God-fearing man like Gordon would never stand for the stuff in his house. Even if she was kind of good-looking, in an off-the-mountain kind of way. Her ankles were way too skinny and would probably snap plumb in half if she ever had to hitch a mule to a plow and cut a straight furrow. Still, she looked a little tough, like a piece of rawhide that had been licked and stuck out in the sun. And she'd walked the quarter mile to the mailbox instead of jumping in a car.

"Hi, Mrs. Ward," the redhead said. "Gordon told me about the tomatoes." Betsy wondered just what Gordon had told, because mere was-n't a lot to tell. She'd known Gordon since he was dragging stained diapers across the floor of the Smith house. Sure, he'd gone off and gotten educated, but he was still the same little boy who'd once pegged her cat with a rotten apple. Plus he had the tainted blood of all the Solom Smiths. "How you liking Solom so far?"

"I like it here. A little different from what I'm used to, though." Betsy wasn't so sure the redhead meant that first part, since the corners of her mouth were turned down and her eyes twitched like she hadn't got a wink of sleep. "How did your garden do this year?"

"Well, Gordon keeps up with that," the redhead said, fanning herself with the envelopes. "We had some cruciform vegetables, cabbage, broccoli, some corn. Gordon said I should take up can-ning." Betsy wanted to ask about the Smith tomatoes, because toma-toes were how you judged a mountain garden. Any two-bit, chicken-stealing farmer could grow a cabbage. But if you could fight off the blight, you either knew what you were doing or your gar-den had been plain blessed by the Lord. But this skinny thing had come in during late summer and wouldn't know a thing about blight.

And probably didn't know a thing about Gordon's ancestor the Circuit Rider. Betsy couldn't say whether that was a good or a bad thing. Ignorance was bliss, they said, but stupidity got you killed.

"Where you from?" Betsy asked. The new woman didn't seem Yankee, or of that species from Florida that had lately become the ruin of the valley.

"I was born in Atlanta, but I settled in Charlotte."

"Charlotte, huh? I seen about that on the news." Betsy was about to bring up all the niggers that shot each other down there. But even with the Confederate battle flags that flew up and down the highway near the tabernacle, she didn't think "nigger" was a Christian term. Besides, those Rebel flags usually fl ew just beneath the Stars and Stripes, so she reckoned that Lincoln's law was probably just a mite superior, though of course far short of the Lord's own.

Arvel's border collie, Digger, had dragged itself from under the shade of the porch and stood by the steps, giving a bark to show he'd been on duty all along.

"It's quite a change," the redhead said. She turned her face to the sun and breathed deeply. "All these mountains and fresh air. It's a lit-tle strange at night to fall asleep without lights burning every-where."

"Oh, we got lights," Betsy said. "God's lights. Them little specks in the sky." The redhead stopped by Betsy's gate. Digger sniffed and growled.

"Hold back Digger," Betsy said. "It's neighbors."

"The constellations," the redhead said her face flushing a little. "You can see them all the way down to the horizon. In my old neighborhood, you saw maybe four stars at night."

"What else you seen? That's a little strange, I mean?"

"Strange? Well, it's all new, of course. Gordon's family has such a rich history here." History just means you lived too long, Betsy thought. Valley families have made their peace with the past. And with the Circuit Rider. The families that are still around, anyhow.

"How's Gordon doing?" she asked.

"He's working on a new book. About Appalachian foot-washing practices."

"If he spent half as much time in church as he did writing about it, he'd be in the Lord's bosom a hundred times over."

The redhead gave a smile, but it looked as if she were chewing glass behind it. "Gordon has a passion for Baptist religion."

"Not the right kind of passion."

"Sorry, Mrs. Ward. I respect his work, and so do a number of anthropologists and sociologists who study this region."

"He ain't dealt with the proper side of things." Digger barked beside her in punctuation.

"I'll share your opinions with him," the redhead said. "My name's Katy, by the way. Katy Logan."

"Logan? I thought you was married."

"We are. I kept my maiden name. Long story."

No story could be long enough if it defied the Old Testament creed that kept a woman subject to her husband. Why, if Betsy so much as opened her mouth in anger to Arvel, he would slap her across the cheek and send her to the floor. In the Free Will church, she kept her mouth shut except for the occasional hymn or moan of praise, and she sat to the left with the other wives and the children. It was important to know your place in God's scheme of things. First there was God, then the Circuit Rider, and then the husband.

Digger growled again, sensing Betsy's unease.

"That girl of yours," Betsy said. "Seen her waiting for the school bus. What's her name?"

"Jessica," the redhead said, avoiding the question that Betsy had really asked: Who was the evil child's father? Because we all know it ain't Gordon. With all that makeup, it's obvious the little tart came straight from fornicating with Satan. Or maybe a Solom billy goat, which amounts to the same thing.

"How's she like school?"

"Okay so far. You know how kids are."

Betsy knew, despite never having raised one. "Well, I'd best get back to my canning."

"Could you show me how to do it someday?"

"Sure thing." Though Betsy had no intention of giving away any information that was useful.

"By the way, do you know anything about the scarecrow? Gordon said it's a local legend."

"Scarecrow? Not heard tell of anything like that."

Unless you have it confused with the Circuit Rider. But Gordon knows better than that.

"Well, no big deal." Katy waved and added a "Good doggie" for Digger's sake, though Digger was having none of it.

Betsy left the dog on the porch to encourage Katy on her way. She watched between the kitchen curtains as the bony woman made her way up the gravel road, grabbing at the goldenrod that bloomed along the ditch.

"Trouble," Betsy muttered to herself. "A skinny woman ain't never been nothing but trouble." Odus Hampton pulled his battered Chevy Blazer into the gen-eral store's rutted parking lot. It was a quarter till nine, which al-most guaranteed he'd be Sarah's first customer of the day. He figured on buying a cup of coffee and a honey bun, something to kick the hangover out of his head before he went up to Bethel Springs. In addition to odd jobs, he worked part-time for Crystal Mountain Bottlers, a Greensboro company that siphoned off fresh mountain spring water, shipped it to a factory for treatment, then charged idiots over a buck a bottle. Even with all those tricks the Arabs were pulling, gas was still cheaper per gallon than the stuff Odus pumped through a hose into Crystal Mountain's tankers. He stepped from the Blazer with a silent groan, his ligaments tight. Maybe if he stuck to spring water instead of Old Crow bour-bon, he wouldn't feel like a sixty-year-old twenty years too soon. He stabbed a Marlboro into his mouth and fired it up, counting the number of steps to the front door to see if he could get half the smoke finished. Even good old Sarah had given in to the "no smok-ing" bullshit, and though she sold two dozen brands of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, and snuff, she wouldn't let her customers use the products in her store. That whole tobacco thing was as bad as the Arabs and their gas, only this time it was the federal government turning the screw. Did away with price support so cigarette compa-nies had farmers by the balls, then taxed the devil out of the stuff on the back end. Odus coughed and spat as he climbed the porch steps. The gen-eral store wasn't as grand as it had been in his childhood when he'd bounced up those steps with a quarter in his pocket and all manner of choices. A quarter could buy you a Batman comic book and a candy bar, or a Pepsi-Cola and a Moon Pie, or a pack of base-ball cards and a bubblegum cigar. Now all a quarter did was weigh down your pants. And Odus's pants needed all the help they could get, what with his belly pushing down on his belt like a water-melon balanced on a clothesline.

The front door was open. That was funny. Sarah always kept it closed until nine on the dot, even though if you were a regular, you could knock and go on in if you showed up a little early. Odus took a final tug of his cigarette and threw it into the sand-filled bucket with all the other unfinished butts. He peered through the screen door, looking for signs of movement.

"Sarah?"

Maybe she was in back, checking on inventory or stacking up some canned preserves that bore the Solom General Store label but were actually contracted to a police auxiliary group over in Westmoreland County. Odus called again. Maybe Sarah had gone over to her house, which sat just beside the store. Decided she'd need a helping of prunes to move things along, maybe. At her age, nature needed a little push now and then.

Odus went to the deli counter at the rear of the store. The cof-feepot sat on top in a little blue tray so customers could help them-selves. Nondairy creamer (which was about like non-cow hamburger if you stopped to mink about it), straws, white packets of sugar, and pink packets of artificial sweetener were scattered across the tray. The coffeemaker was turned off, and the pot was empty and as cold as a witch's heart in December. Sarah always made coffee first thing.

A twinge rippled through Odus's colon, as if a tiny salamander were turning flips down there. It might have been a cheap whiskey fart gathering steam, or it might have been the first stirring of un-ease. Either way, Odus felt it was time for some fresh morning air. As he passed the register on the way out, he saw Sarah's frail body curled across a couple of sacks of feed corn. Her eyes were par-tially open, her mouth slack, a thick strand of drool hanging from one corner of her gray lips. Odus went around the counter and knelt on the buckled hard-wood floor, feeling for her pulse. All he felt was his own, the hangover beating through his thumb. He turned her face up and put his cheek near her mouth. A stagnant breeze stirred, with that peculiar old-person's smell of pine and decay. She was alive.

"Sarah," Odus said, patting her cheek, trying to remember what those emergency techs did in the television shows. All he ever watched was the crime scene shows, and those dealt with people who were already dead. He turned back to the counter and was searching among the candy wrappers, invoices, and business cards for the phone when he heard a soft moan.

Sarah blinked once, a film over her eyes like spiderwebs. She tried to sit up, but Odus eased her back down.

"Sarah, what happened?"

Her mouth opened, and with her wrinkled neck and glazed eyes, she looked like a fledging robin trying to suck a digested worm from its mother's beak.

"Easy, now," Odus said, his mouth parched, wishing Solom was-n't in the dry part of the county and a cold beer was in the cooler alongside the seventeen kinds of cola.

"Hat," Sarah said.

"Yes, ma'am, it's sure hot for September," Odus said. "You must have worked up an early sweat. Overdid it a little. But you just sit and rest now."

Sarah slapped at his chest with a bony hand. "Haaaat."

"I know. I'll get you some water."

Sarah grabbed his forearm, her fingers like the talons of a red hawk. She sat up, her face rigid. "You damned drunken fool," she said, spittle flying from her mouth. "The man in the hat. He's back." Sarah's eyes closed and she collapsed onto the gray, coarse sacks, her breathing shallow but steady. Odus renewed his search for the phone. Going on about a hat, of all things. She must have had a stroke and blown her senses. Most males in these parts wore a hat, and it wasn't unknown for them to come back now and again.

Chapter Seven

Total suck city.

Mrs. McNeeley was outlining on the chalkboard, lecturing like she usually did with her back to the class. To the sixth grade English teacher, instruction meant breathing chalk dust and turn-ing her pupils'

brains to sawdust. Who the hell cared what a direct object was, or a plural nominative? Like anybody was ever going to need to know that stuff in real life.

But teachers like Mrs. McNeeley were great for those kids who were logging their time and sopping up free lunches while waiting until they could legally drop out. Like Grady Eggers and Tommy Williamson on the back row. If McNeeley had the sense to seat the kids in alphabetical order, the problem would cut itself in half. As it was, the two goons kept up a spitball barrage and a constant taunting of everyone around them. Like all successful goons, and most of that species had been gifted by God Grady and Tommy knew when it was time to play the angel, to let their faces go soft and wounded whenever another student made an accusation or complaint.

Like this morning when Tommy had made a grab for Jett's ass in the hall. That kind of thing was flattering in the fifth grade, when you didn't have any ass worth grabbing, but now she was on the verge of becoming a lady, and as freaky as that was, she thought her body had some value. She had whirled and tried to kick him in that mys-terious region between his legs, where all manner of lumpy, dis-gusting things dangled but at the last second he had twisted away and her foot bounced harmlessly off his thigh. Worse, he caught her leg while she was off-balance, tilted her over like DiCaprio going for Winslet in Titanic, or maybe Gable doing Leigh if you were lame enough to have watched Gone With the Wind, as she had. Tommy put his mouth close to hers, braces and all, and whis-pered

"Not a bad move for a headless chicken."

Then he spun her in spastic imitation of a Spanish dance, the other kids laughing as she fell to her knees, and a nuclear orange anger had erupted behind her eyelids. She must have screamed be-cause when the dust cleared the beefy assistant principal Richard Bell, known to the kids as Dicky Dumbbell, had sequestered Tommy away for a private counsel. Apparently sexual harassment wasn't a serious offense at Cross Valley Elementary, because Tommy had been right on time for first-period geography, and since Cross Valley was a small school, Jett was in the same class. Tommy had winked at her and given a twisted smile that held the promise of fu-ture humiliation.

The worst thing of all was that part of her had flushed some se-cret and forbidden woman region that craved attention but didn't know quite what to do with it.

And so the day had gone. Now, with McNeeley's sentence dia-grams covering the chalkboard and the hands of the clock reaching wearily toward two, Jett was calculating how fast she could reach the door when the final bell rang. She closed her eyes and must have dozed because she saw a man in a black hat at McNeeley's desk, seven feet tall, moth holes in his frayed suit. He held a thick Bible in his left hand his pale right hand raised and miles beyond the sleeve of his too-small jacket.

"The possessive of a name ending in s is followed by apostro-phe s, except, strangely enough, in the case of Jesus," he intoned with a voice as dark and loud as Revelation's thunder. "In that case, it's just an apostrophe by itself. That's according to The Chicago Manual of Style, brothers and sisters. Special rule for Jesus. Amen."

Jett's eyes snapped open and she found her head had almost banged against the top of her desk, the one with the greasy pencil slot and Suck Big Donky Dix carved into the surface. McNeeley was finishing some monotone declaration or another, and the class had long since given in to fidgeting. Tommy made a bleating, goatish sound from the back of the class, causing McNeeley to turn. She stood with the piece of chalk in her hand, her eyes like milk.

"Did someone have a question?" she asked.

"Yeah," Grady Eggers said, raising his hand and lifting himself out of his seat. He was already five-ten and had the first signs of stubble, the kind of kid who was headed for either gridiron glory or the oily pits of auto shop.

McNeeley tugged at her cardigan and pushed her cat's-eye glasses up her long nose. "Mr. Eggers?"

"Does Jesus really get no s?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean, why does he get treated any different? You said every rule applies to everybody the same." Jett was wide awake now, no matter how drowsy she had been before.

"I don't understand," Mrs. McNeeley said, putting on her teacher's smile, the automatic response to anything that cast doubt on the textbook.

"You said Jesus was the exception to the rule."

The class grew silent. Even Tommy Williamson looked pensive, a rare expression for him.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Eggers. I didn't say a thing about Jesus."

"You said he don't get no apostrophe s, just an apostrophe." Grady sounded uneasy, on the edge of rage. "I heard it plain as day. Why come is that?"

"We were discussing when to use 'who' or 'whom' in the objec-tive case," McNeeley said. "I don't see how our dear Lord and Savior could enter into it."

The bell gave its brittle cry of release, and the tension in the class dropped like a wet rope. Jett gathered her books, hoping to make it to the next class be-fore Tommy caught up with her. She felt faint, partly due to the vi-sion she'd had of the man in the black hat. But Grady had apparently heard the man's words, though from McNeeley's mouth. Did it really count as a vision if two people experienced it, or did you chalk it up to the beginnings of mass hysteria?

In fifth grade health class in Charlotte, Jett had been subjected to the ever-popular drug scare videos. While most of the kids had snickered as somber narrators expounded on the dangers of evil weed, Jett had actually paid attention. Unlike the others, who wouldn't know a yellow jacket from a roach, Jett saw it as an op-portunity to educate herself. She'd paid attention when the talking head launched into a tirade on acid flashbacks, in which a bad trip could come on weeks, months, or even years after the initial

"ex-posure." Come right out of the blue, the narrator had said. Totally unexpected and without warning. Flashback sufferers often went to the hospital because they thought they were having a nervous breakdown.

The whole thing was starting to freak her out. It was possible that Grady, too, had dropped LSD. But that still didn't mean they would have the same flashback. And how could you "flash back" to something that had never happened before?

Gordon would probably know, but she'd rather eat a hot popsi-cle in hell than talk with him about anything in her personal life.

But which one was the hallucination, the scarecrow man she'd seen in the barn or the man in the black hat?

She negotiated the halls, weaving through kids in denim jackets with rolled-up sleeves, low-hanging pants, the girls wearing wide belts. Even here in the sticks, it seemed everybody knew about Old Navy and Gap. A bunch of brainless trendoids. Some of the red-neck boys wore flannel, but they stuck to their own kind, stomping their boots as if to knock the cow shit out of the treads, sneaking pinches of Skoal between their cheeks and gums.

"What's the hurry?" came a girl's voice behind her.

Jett wheeled to face Bethany, who was as cool as Mentos in her short skirt and blue halter top with bra straps showing. "No hurry, I just have to do my homework before math class."

"But class starts in four minutes."

"That's what I mean. I don't want to disappoint Mrs. Stansberry. She's the only cool teacher I have."

"Did you sleep okay? You look like you're late for your own fu-neral. Or maybe your eye shadow's a little thick today."

"Thanks for the compliment."

"No, you're good. This Goth thing looks bitching. I wish my parents would let me get away with it."

"See, that's just it. You don't ask your parents, you tell them. Have to show them who is boss right from diapers."

"I'll bet yours were black."

"Well, not while they were clean."

"Ooh, yuck." Bethany crinkled her overly pert nose.

"What are you doing after school?"

"Feeding the goats."

"I hate those cloven-hoofed little monsters. They scare me."

Bethany laughed. "They're okay. The males, the billy goats, stink unless you cut their balls off. My dad has a metal band that you put around them, then leave it for a few weeks. The balls swell up and turn black and gross, and then they fall off. Problem solved."

Jett shuddered. She wasn't an expert in male anatomy, but she was under the impression that the testicles were the most vulnera-ble spot on their bodies. Which is why you tried to kick there in an emergency. But causing their balls to rot seemed like the sort of punishment that should be reserved for the very worst of them. Creatures like Tommy Williamson.

Jett decided she wouldn't complain about her own chores for a while. Sweeping the living room didn't seem so bad when com-pared to forking hay to a goat. "Well, I've got to get to that home-work. Say hi to Chuck for me."

Bethany's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Your boyfriend. The Chuckster."

"You don't even know him."

"You told me all about him. Chuck steak, one hundred percent lean."

"And don't forget he's mine." Bethany frowned and turned, then was swept away in the tide of students. Jett looked at the clock on the wall. Two minutes to solve six math problems. And me rest of her life to solve all the rest of her problems.

September was a melancholy month for Alex Eakins. It was the month his childhood mutt rolled himself under the wheels of a FedEx van, the month he'd lost his virginity after a high school football game to a girl who later ditched him for a married man, the month his dad and mom separated, the month he'd been kicked out of Duke for lousy grades and attendance. Since he'd moved to the mountains and spent his trust fund on a little piece of south-facing land on the mountain above Solom, September had been a time of dying.

He sniffed the air, which was sweet with the sugar of red maples and crab apples. The stench of decay should have been there, but the only rot came from the black innards of his composting toilet, where bacteria performed its thankless job of turning shit to dirt. Nature was just beginning to accept that winter was on the way, that every living thing would soon be asleep or dead. He wondered which of those he would be.

Alex had embraced organic gardening as a lifestyle, earning enough by selling produce at the county farmers' market to pay his property taxes. He had studied all the latest sustainable building techniques, and his own house was a mix of technologies both primitive and new. Since he lived off-grid and wasn't beholden to the building inspection and permitting process, Alex had used cob and straw bale construction for part of his house, which was cut partly into the bank. From the outside, the structure looked as much like an aboriginal mud hut as anything, but it was incredibly energy efficient. A small cluster of solar panels on the roof ran a dorm-sized refrigerator, and a woodstove system circulated hot water through the house. Alex had fixed a generator to a paddle wheel in the creek that gushed along one side of his property. The generator, along with a miniature wind turbine, fed a bank of alter-nating-current batteries, so he was covered no matter what the weather.

The system was put together in the aftermath of Y2K, when all the doomsayers had realized the world wasn't going to end after all and had sold their survival gear. Well, the world may have ended already, for all Alex knew. Because it was autumn again, and the tomatoes were turning to mush on the vines and the corn was get-ting hard. The cool-weather greens like collards, spinach, and turnips still had a few weeks to go, but soon enough the market would close for the season. Alex had a truckload of pumpkins to sell for Halloween, and one more good haul of organic broccoli, but after that, he would have to go back to work. Or else sell a little of the marijuana he cultivated.

But that meant dealing with people.

The same idiotic people who had driven him to the isolation of his mountain retreat Despite the added pleasure of end-running the government and the lure of the world's last free-market econ-omy, seling dope was almost as much trouble as having a square job.

Alex dumped a bucket of table scraps onto his garden compost heap and looked over the valley below. The trees were just starting to turn color along the highway, where the roots were stressed by construction and carbon monoxide. A gravel road ran past the Ward and Smith houses before disappearing into the thicket and winding up to Alex's house. The road got a lot bumpier and rutted past Gordon Smith's, because Alex believed in inhibiting curiosity-seekers. Not because he was antisocial as his mom had claimed or a stubborn asshole as his dad had believed but because he didn't have the patience to deal with accidental tourists and uninvited guests. Plus, the government might have an interest in finding him.

Besides, he wasn't antisocial. Just ask Meredith, the earth chick he'd met at the farmers' market who had occupied half of his bed on and off since April. But April was a green month and October was red and golden, so he expected her to light out before the first killing frost. Her voice came from the wooden deck. "Honey?"

Honey. That reminded him, next year he planned on setting up a honeybee hive. With all the pests that attacked honeybees, the real stuff was getting more and more valuable. Alex was sure he could do it right, and have the fringe benefit of his own tiny, winged army of blossom pollinators—

"Alex?"

He put down the scrap bucket and picked up the heavy hoe. 'Yes, dear?"

"Are you mad at me about something?"

"Of course not." Down below, through the trees, a thread of gray smoke rose from the Ward chimney.

"You only call me 'dear' when you're mad at me."

"That's not so."

"And you say it out the side of your mouth, like you're talking on automatic or something. Like you're miles away."

Gasoline was pushing two-fifty a gallon, thanks to the military-industrial complex that ruled the country, and that had to be fac-tored against the profit from a load of pumpkins. Maybe he'd drive the load to Westridge. The college kids had plenty of money. He should know, as much grass as he'd peddled to them over the last couple of years. "Everything's fine, dear."

"See? There you go again."

"Huh?"

"You said 'dear' again."

He turned and squinted up at the deck. The day was bright, though cool. Meredith stood in a gray terry-cloth robe, her blond hair wet and steaming. No doubt she was nude beneath, and Alex thought of those nipples that were the color and consistency of pencil erasers. He could almost smell her shampoo, the hippie-dippy expensive stuff she bought at the health food store. He tight-ened his grip on the hoe.

"Sorry," he said. "I was thinking about autumn."

"Like, fall?"

"Yeah. Everything's dying but there's a promise of rebirth. It's metaphorical."

"Alex, have you been in the stash?"

"Did you know that most leaves aren't really green? The chloro-phyll in the leaves masks their true color, and when the growing process slows down for autumn, the chlorophyll fades and the true color emerges. It's the process of dying that finally reveals the leaf. So all that green, happy horseshit is a lie."

"Alex? Are you okay?"

Sure, he was okay. He had been okay for years. Marijuana was his antidepressant, and his crop kept him supplied year-round. He also traded on the black market to support his other little hobby—the one locked in the walk-in closet downstairs—but figured he'd proba-bly get caught one day and the cops would seize his land. All be-cause he liked to smoke a little weed, which was none of the government's business besides the fact that it kept Republicans in office. At least weed was honest, though the system wasn't. Weed stayed green, even after it was dead, even after you smoked it and it grew a bouquet of blossoms in your head. True colors, for real.

Meredith smoked it, too, but only before bed, because it made her terribly horny. In fact, Alex often wondered if that was the sole reason she had stayed over that night in April, and then the next night, and before the end of the week she'd begun leaving her clothes in his dresser. And that, as any guy knows, had been the time to say he wasn't sure they were ready for such a commitment, but another joint and Alex had his head between her thighs and, well, he supposed it could be worse. At least she could cook vegan meals.

He smiled up at her, or maybe he was grimacing from dawn's glare in his eyes. "I'm fine," he said. "I was just wondering whether to take the pumpkins down to the college or try my luck at the mar-ket."

"The market's been a little slow, and some of the other vendors will probably undercut you. Better to go where there's no competi-tion."

"Makes sense." Meredith had been a business major, graduating cum laude the year before with a degree in marketing. Alex had majored in botany, but all he'd learned was how to grow some high-class, kick-ass grass. And how to flunk out and disappoint his parents.

"Are you going into town?" Meredith asked. "Town" meant Windshake, the Pickett county seat, which was fifteen miles away. No one thought of Solom as a town, though it had a zip code and post office. Windshake was where people did their serious shop-ping, and the Solom General Store was a place to pop in for veg-etable seeds, or a bag of Fritos corn chips and a Snickers bar when the munchies got extreme.

"Maybe later," he said. He never wore a watch, and if he had to get a part-time gig for the winter, that meant showing up according to some corporate master's rigid timetable. Time was flexible and shouldn't be tied down to numbers. Like, this was now and later was later, and yesterday was like the ashes and grunge in the bot-tom of the bong. And tomorrow was, like, maybe a pot seed or something.

"Well then, what do you want to do this fine Saturday morn-ing?" Meredith leaned over the deck, letting her robe fall open and offering a generous view that rivaled the glory of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He grinned, or maybe a gnat was flitting near his eyes. "Roll one and I'll come up in a minute." She smiled. "Breakfast in bed?"

"Sure—" He started to add "dear," but caught himself. Meredith padded across the deck Alex had built with his own two hands using wormy chestnut planks he'd taken from an aban-doned barn. Maybe Meredith belonged here. She was organic in her way, wasn't spoiled by modern conveniences, and had grown on him over the months. He just couldn't understand why, as she'd talked to him, his grip on the hoe had tightened. He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white.

"Yes, dear," he whispered, chopping at a plantain that had taken root by the garden. Plantains carried the same blight that killed tomatoes in wet weather. They were evil weeds if God had ever made such a thing.

Alex had lifted the hoe for a second blow when he saw a skewed stand of stalks at the end of his garden. Something had been in his corn. He stepped over the rows of broccoli and walked past the beds of young collards, his blood rising to a boil. The corn had been trampled and the tops were bitten off a number of the plants. Deer sometimes came through the woods to feast on the garden, though their visits had dwindled after Alex had picked up a tip from a fellow organic gardener. A little human piss around the garden's perimeter kept deer away, because as dumb as the dark-eyed crea-tures were, they'd been around long enough to associate people with murder.

This wasn't deer damage. Because a slew of stalks were littered along the fence that separated his property line from the Smiths'.

Alex was ambivalent about fences, since Starship Earth be-longed to everybody, though he'd made sure he knew his property boundaries after the survey was complete. He believed in the laws of Nature, but that didn't mean the rest of his nasty, grab-ass species did. They believed in pieces of paper in the courthouse, or pieces of paper in banks, or pieces of paper in Washington, D.C. But, piece of paper or not, one thing was for sure: goats couldn't read, and even if they could Alex would bet a half kilo of home-grown that they would ignore what was written on the deed any-way. He kept a tight grip on the hoe just in case one of the weird-eyed bastards was still around. The wire fence was bent just a little, as if something heavy had leaned on it. Heavier than a goat, by the looks of it. Alex hesitated. He tried to live in harmony with the world even if six and a half billion hairless apes threatened to make the place uninhabitable. He could either go down and have a talk with Gordon Smith or he could crawl over into enemy territory and administer some moun-tain justice.

"Alexxxxxx!" From the purr in Meredith's voice, Alex guessed she'd already fired up the joint. He dropped the hoe.

"I'll be back," he said to the woods beyond the fence.

Gordon sat by the cold fireplace, a book in his lap called The Airwaves of Zion by Howard Dorgan. Gordon had explained the significance of backwoods gospel radio shows on tiny AM stations, but Katy had nodded enthusiastically while her mind wandered to the fresh asparagus and dill weed in the refrigerator. She'd left the room at the earliest opportunity, and she'd returned to find him dozing. His head was tilted back on the Barcalounger, a delicate snore rising from his open mouth. Katy had never noticed how pale his neck was beneath his closely trimmed beard. His hands were soft, with the fingers of an academician, not a farmer. He had the drawn and wrinkled cheeks of a smoker, though he owned a pipe merely as an affectation. He'd only smoked it a half dozen times since they had been married which was good because the smell of the rich tobacco made Katy's head spin.

It was rare that she had a chance to study him in daylight. When they were together, his eyes dominated her, and she felt herself paying attention to his every word. That same power had brought Katy under his spell when he'd delivered his presentation on Appalachian religion at that Asheville seminar.

Looking back on it, she realized she'd been lectured, not con-versed with. And she had been the student eager to please, sitting on the edge of her seat, face warm at the prospect of proving her worth as a listener. She found herself flushing now, standing over his sleeping form, bothered that she was only on equal footing when Gordon was unconscious. Even in bed...

She didn't want to think about bed. Their sheets were way too clean and smooth, each spouse's side clearly marked. A stack of hardcovers on Gordon's dresser, a water glass, and a case for his eyeglasses. A box of Kleenex on Katy's side, along with a bottle of lotion, a candle, and a pack of throat lozenges. In her drawer lay birth control pills, clothing catalogs, Tylenol PM, Barbara Michaels paperbacks, lip balm, and beneath all that feminine detritus, Katy's vibrator, her longtime romantic partner in Charlotte. A monogamous and loyal lover, always attentive, considerate, and sober. Everything that Mark wasn't.

Katy was afraid Gordon would find the vibrator, but Gordon hadn't exactly set the marital bed on fire, either. In fact, he'd not even struck a match.

Maybe professors of religion had to take a vow of celibacy. Though Katy had no moral qualms on the issue, she wondered if premarital sex should perhaps become a legal requirement. After all, you might say

"I do" even when the person standing with you before the priest might be thinking "I never will." Mark had been a real believer in premarital sex, to the tune of two or three rounds per day. He called it the

"Protestant sex ethic," though Mark had been about as Protestant as a pope. His ardor hadn't dampened once they had tied the knot and the beautiful miracle named Jett had slid down her vaginal canal. Still, the years had left a growing gap between them, and late-night whispered secrets had given way to accusations and aloofness.

But that's not why you divorced him.

Katy walked away from the fireplace. She had more pressing matters at hand than a good wallow in the swamp of regret. Like the butternut squash in the oven.

She found herself thinking of it as the "fucking butternut." Katy made a conscious effort to quit cursing when Jett was a toddler, after the first time she'd heard Jett burp, sit propped up on her wadded diaper, and say, "Fuck." With a toothless grin that melted matronly hearts all the way back to Mesopotamia, Jett had declared her intelligence and the simultaneous importance of surroundings on her upbringing. But Jett was on her way home from school, ei-ther by bus or with the trustworthy Mrs. Stansberry up the road. So Katy felt comfortable saying it aloud, but not too loudly. "Fucking butternut," she said, as she grabbed her pot holder and reached for the oven door.

The whisper that skirled from the pantry was probably nothing more than the September breeze bouncing off the curtains and playing around the room, carrying the autumnal scent of Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, and pumpkin. But it sounded like a word. Or a name.

"Kaaaay."

Katy grabbed a spatula between the thumb and mitt of the pot holder and spun like a ballet dancer after three shots of whiskey. "Who said that?"

She was annoyed both at herself and at whatever trick of physics had made her panic. Her heart fluttered, and an uneven rhythm pounded in her ears, like when the natives were asking King Kong to step up to the altar and accept their drugged sacrifice. Fay Wray in the original, Jessica Lange in the De Laurentiis version, and Naomi Watts as the hot blonde du jour in the Peter Jackson remake.

"Kaaaaaaaaay"

"Go away." Katy held up the spatula like a hatchet, hoping to ward off the invisible thing in the corner of the kitchen. Gordon's first wife didn't belong here anymore. She was dead. Rebecca did-n't exist. This was Katy's house now.

And Solom was her home.

Something stirred in the attic. Damned mice. She'd have to speak to Gordon about them. Later. First, she had a meal to prepare.

Chapter Eight

Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church was a one-room wooden building that sat on a crooked row of concrete blocks. The white paint had curled away in places, and the thickness of the chips showed the age of the church. The grounds were well tended, and the waterway that gave the church its name ran barely twenty feet from the front door. A deep pool at the base of a short waterfall made for convenient dipping when baptisms were performed.

David Tester ran a Weed Eater around the wooden steps. Like most rural mountain preachers, he had a real job during the week. David owned a landscaping business, which never would have made it had it not been for the seasonal home owners who had nei-ther the time nor the inclination to do their own yard work. David saw it as a sign from the Lord that outsiders belonged in Solom. Since the Primitives believed in predestination, David didn't have to worry about converting anyone. Their names were either listed in the Big Book or they weren't, simple as that.

Gordon Smith, the college professor, had asked him why his de-nomination still held services when there seemed to be no ultimate goal. To David, the goal was to live right and to get along, and reg-ular church services couldn't hurt. Besides, this was a community church, and though families could now pile up in a car and drive to one of the fancy churches in Windshake or Titusville, most of the locals preferred to go to the church where they had been raised. The congregation was aging, but that was true of all the old Baptist subdenominations. Seemed the kids didn't take to the Bible the way they used to, and David could hardly blame them.

The Weed Eater's thick fishing line plowed through the ragweed and saw briars that sprouted along the building's foundation. The buzz of the gas-powered engine echoed over the hillside and a veil of blue smoke lifted into the cloudless sky. The rotating line hit gravel and a rock spun free, bouncing off the plank siding of the church. Shredded vegetation stuck to the shins of David's jeans. David was about to trim around the old cemetery stones when he noticed a small dark hole in the ground by the first grave. He killed the engine and his ears rang in the sudden silence. He knelt by the hole. The grave was that of Harmon Smith, a horseback preacher from the 1800s. Horseback preachers traveled from com-munity to community in all kinds of weather, staying with a host family for a week or two at a time. David admired the sacrifice of such men of God, though Smith had been a little scattershot in his beliefs. He preached to all denominations and according to legend had managed to fit his message to each without ever slipping up by trying to save a Primitive or letting a woman wash a man's feet dur-ing the annual Old Regular Baptist foot-washing ceremonies. Then he'd gotten what the old folks called "a mite touched" and had be-come devoted to the idea of sacrifice, even breeding his own life-stock to serve as Old Testament-style offerings.

The grave hole was probably made by a mouse. David looked around for a rock so he could plug it. A mouse's den probably had a back door, but David didn't think it was proper for a creature to be crawling all around in the preacher's bones. Harmon Smith had earned his rest.

David went to the parking lot and found a fist-sized chunk of granite. He tossed it up, enjoying its weight. David had been a pitcher on the Titusville High School nine and still liked to play church league softball. He was approaching the grave again when he saw the twitch of a dark tail as it disappeared down the hole. Too big to be a mouse. And it was scaly.

Sort of like a David told himself that no snake would burrow into the ground on such a sunny day. It would be on a rock somewhere, absorbing the heat. David ran across snakes all the time in his landscaping work. They were mostly harmless, though copperheads and rattlers lived in these mountains and water moccasins could be found along the rivers and streams. David held the rock by his ear as he approached, ready to hurl it if a serpent's head poked out of the hole.

A truck passed on the highway, slowed, and honked. David lifted his left hand in greeting without taking his gaze from the hole. The truck pulled into the parking lot. David knew how silly he looked, standing in the little cemetery with its worn gray stones, holding a rock like some kid who was afraid of ghosts.

He tossed the rock toward the creek. The truck door opened and James Greene, one of the church elders, climbed down from the seat. He wore denim overalls and a plaid shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thin forearms with silver, wiry hairs. Greene pushed his Atlanta Braves baseball cap off his balding head, wiped at the sweat, then returned the cap to its usual skewed resting place.

"Hi, Elder David," James said.

"Elder James," David said in welcome.

"You tending to the grounds?"

"Even Eden needed a little clip job now and then."

"Hmm." James looked at Harmon Smith's grave, which had a depression in the earth at the foot of the stone. "The grass grows best over him that sleeps with a clear heart."

"The joyous day is coming soon," David said. "The elected shall rise up and walk with the Lord." James noticed the dark hole. "Hey, look at that," he said.

"Figured it was a mouse. It's about time of year for them to start laying winter plans."

"No mouse. That's a copperhead tunnel."

"I never saw a copperhead in a hole before."

"Of course you ain't. Smart, ain't they? A lot of people think snakes are pure, dumb evil, but they know how to sneak. Do you know if you cut off a snake's head, the snake won't die till sun-down?"

"I've killed one or two in my time."

"Some of them churches in Kentucky handle snakes during worship service," James said. "Pretty damn stupid if you ask me."

"There's a verse in the Gospel According to Mark that says if your faith is true, you can take up serpents and they will not harm you."

"Still sounds pretty damn dumb to me. Pardon my language, Elder David." David kept his eye on the opening to the hole. He was trying not to think of the snake twisting through the moldy rib cage of the itinerant preacher. That seemed like a blasphemy that God would never allow. Maybe David could set some kind of trap for it, restore things to their proper order. If it be God's will, of course.

"I hear the Carters left the congregation," James said. "Took up with the Free Willers." David wiped the sweat and stray bits of grass from his face. "Yeah. I talked to Benjamin Carter about it. He said with all the trouble going on in the world, he needed extra reassurance. Said it wasn't enough to just sit back and hope you were one of the saved. Said he felt better if he took matters into bis own hands a little. Of course, Rosie went along with him, like a good wife will."

"We're down to two dozen members, Elder David."

David nodded. Since the Primitives didn't believe in missionary work, there was no call to go out among the people and recruit new members. The younger generation had drifted away from all the churches, not just the Primitive subdenomination. Sometimes David watched those showy evangelists on television with their silk neckties and stiff hair and felt a little jealous. He wondered how he would fare out there onstage, where you felt the Spirit work in you as you exhorted others to take Jesus Christ into their hearts and be born again.

The Primitives had already been born into grace, according to their statement of beliefs, so believers had little to do besides wait around for the Rapture. Of course, the rituals at church helped soothe worldly troubles. And services offered fellowship, too, something still a little rare in the mountains, with the closest Wal-Mart over fifty miles away. The Solom General Store had a potbel-lied stove and a little dining area, but loud tourists with their cell phones and cologne had altered the store's atmosphere, and in some ways, their money had taken it out of the hands of the com-munity.

"The Lord will take care of it," David said. The collection plate had yielded more metal than paper over the last few months. David didn't preach for money, though he did accept reimbursement for the gas and equipment he used to maintain the church grounds.

"Folks around here could use a good miracle or two," James said.

"Amen to that." David fixed his gaze on the hole, which glared right back like a cold ebony eye. Sarah Jeffers came to her senses in a dimly lighted room. At first, she thought she was in her bed on the second floor of the old family home by the store, because the light through the window had a late-Sunday-morning quality. Sunday was her sleep-in day, and her headache might have been caused by a couple of tall after-din-ner sherries. Her eyelids were heavy, so she listened for the ticking of the antique grandfather clock downstairs. She heard nothing but a faint, irregular beeping. And the smell was all wrong. Instead of aged wood musty quilts, and cats, the room had the crisp tang of antiseptic. She opened her eyes and blinked her vision into focus. The walls were white, unlike the maple paneling of her bedroom. The pillows were encased in vinyl and the bed was angled up like a lounge chair at the side of a swimming pool.

"Back among the waking," a young woman said. "How do you feel?"

"Get me a doctor," Sarah said.

The woman smiled. "I am a doctor. Dr. Hyatt. You're in Tri-Cities Regional Hospital." Sarah closed her eyes. Doctors were supposed to be male and gray-haired. How could this urchin know the least little thing about the workings of the human body? She didn't look old enough to have ever dissected a frog, much less gone through medical school.

"One of your friends found you at your store," Dr. Hyatt said. "You were unconscious."

"And that's a bad thing, right?"

"A sense of humor. Good. 'Laughter is the best medicine' is not just a section in Reader's Digest. The claim also has some research backing it up."

"Then tell me a good one so I can laugh my way out of this hun-dred-dollar-an-hour prison cell. Let me out of here."

"It's not that simple, Miss Jeffers. It is 'miss,' isn't it?"

"I can't lay around here during store hours. I got customers to see to."

"We ran some tests while you were unconscious. You had symp-toms of a stroke, but your EEG and CAT were fine and your blood pressure is that of somebody thirty years younger."

"Tests? Who signed for them? And why are these wires sticking in me?"

"The gentleman who called 9-1-1 said you had no next of kin. We followed the usual procedures for treating an apparent stroke victim."

"But I ain't been stroked, have I?"

"Not that we can tell. We thought you might have suffered a blow to the head maybe by a can falling from a top shelf. Or a rob-bery. But the register was untouched and the store appeared to be intact. Your friend called the sheriff's department and they checked it out. And you have no visible marks." Sarah struggled to sit up, saw black spots before her eyes, and decided to try again a little later. "I hope somebody locked up. Half the merchandise will walk off otherwise."

"The deputies will take care of that. Your job is to get better." The black spots coalesced behind her eyelids, turning into a shadow, a man in a black, wide-brimmed hat. She reached out for the doctor's arm and clutched it, afraid the image would still be there if she opened her eyes. The beeping accelerated.

"Are you okay, Miss Jeffers?"

"I seen him," she said.

"Your friend? He said you were unconscious, but you might have been partially aware of what was going on. It's not unusual during a fainting spell."

"No, before that. I seen him." Suddenly she wasn't in such a big hurry to leave Titusville and go back to Solom.

"Just breathe regularly," Dr. Hyatt said patting Sarah's hand until the beep marking her pulse became steady again. "Rest up. You're not going anywhere for a little while." That sounded good to Sarah. She closed her eyes and tried to block the recurring image of the man tilting up his chin until the wide brim no longer hid his face.

Or what was left of his face.

Odus had stayed with Sarah for a couple of hours, but when the doctor reported that she was awake and alert, yet refusing visitors, he'd driven his Blazer back to Solom and the Smith farm. He had agreed to help Gordon put up some corn, though it hadn't quite gotten frozen enough to harden for feed. Now, ripping and twisting the brown ears from their stalks, he decided that Gordon's crops were Gordon's business, as long as the man paid cash. Odus was thirsty after the fright Sarah had thrown into him, and he'd picked up a quart of sipping whiskey from the Titusville liquor store. A few hours of September sweat and he'd have earned a sip or two.

Gordon usually left the grunt work to Odus, but today the pro-fessor was pitching in, working the rows right alongside him. They filled bushel baskets and carried them to the end of the row where Gordon had parked his riding lawn mower. Gordon didn't own a tractor, though a metal relic from the horse-drawn days gathered rust between the barn and garden. Odus was thinking about what Sarah had said, about the man in the hat, when Gordon spoke.

"Guess it's time to take down the scarecrow," Gordon said.

Odus looked up at the form on the wooden crossbar whose head stood a good two feet above the dried blooms of the corn. It wore an old straw-reed hat that had been bleached by the sun and mottled gray by the rain, tied with twine to the feed-sack face. People in Solom were peculiar about their scarecrows, treating them like family members, using the same one from year to year. Odus had always thought it was some sort of good-luck ritual. The habit was to store the scarecrow in the barn, where it would hang on the wall and watch over the livestock during the long winter. Odus had been working for Gordon three years, and knew the usual time to tuck the straw man away was in late October, when the nights grew short and the wind rattled strange syllables in the leaves.

"A little early yet, ain't it?" Odus asked.

Gordon put a gloved hand over his eyes and scanned the clear sky. "There's a storm coming."

"Don't believe so. The birds aren't quiet and the mice are no busier than usual." Gordon pulled off his glove, fished a handkerchief from his jeans pocket, and wiped his glasses. His eyes were glittery and un-focused, and he looked lost. "I'm talking about a different kind of storm, Odus."

Odus plucked another ear and twisted it free with a crackle of ripped vegetation. He tossed it in the basket, then moved the basket a few feet forward.

"I don't know anything about that," Odus said.

"Do you know the scarecrow is more than just a trick to keep birds away?" Odus didn't like the way Gordon's soft eyes looked past him to the pastures beyond. "Well, I'm not so sure they even do that worth a darn," he said. "I had to replant three times this spring. The little thieves just swooped on in here like nobody's business."

Gordon kept on as if he'd not heard Odus, who imagined that this was how the professor got when he was lecturing in the class-room to a bunch of stoned-out rich kids. "The scarecrow is as old as domesticated crops. Way back to Babylonia, which many schol-ars believe is the Garden of Eden of the Bible."

"I'm not much on history books or the Bible." Odus tore a cou-ple of ears of corn free, reveling in the sweet starchy smell. "The first tells you what went wrong and the second tells you why. I pre-fer to stay uninformed, myself."

Gordon put his glasses back, which eased Odus's worry a little. Odus realized what Gordon's naked eyes had reminded him of: the goats. They had that same heavy-lidded unfocused stare.

"The scarecrow wasn't always an outfit of clothing stuffed with straw," Gordon said, returning to work.

"In the old days, a live man was tied in the garden."

Odus glanced at the professor, figuring the man was putting him on. Gordon's face was as steady as always. Come to think of it, Gordon had never cracked a joke. He seemed unable to laugh and even a smile looked like it hurt him some. "To keep birds away?"

"Well, that it did. Except other animals came, especially at night. A helpless man in the wilderness drew a lot of predators."

"Why did they do that? Punishment?"

"More than punishment. Sacrifice. A gift to the harvest gods."

"Sounds like something a heathen would do."

"It was widely practiced in many cultures. Germanic tribes used to spike their victims to a tree. In the South Seas, witch priests claimed their island deities called for sacrifices to appease their wrath. African kings killed those magicians who failed to bring the rain. The ancient Greeks had all manner of sacrificial victims, both to Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Ceres, the harvest goddess."

"Did they really believe it?"

"Blood makes the best fertilizer," Gordon said.

They were closer to the scarecrow now, and the coarse fabric of its face suggested a scowl. Odus couldn't be sure, but it looked to have changed position on the crossbar, its arms hanging down a lit-tle lower. Ragged gloves had been attached to the flannel shirt-sleeves with baling wire, and Odus thought he saw one of the gloves lift in a beckoning motion.

"The scarecrow is dry," Gordon said. "And it thirsts." Odus swallowed hard. He thirsted too, and hoped the quart of bourbon would be enough to wash down the vision of the scare-crow's wave.

"Well, I think we got enough to tide the goats over for a few days," he said. "Maybe we should leave the rest of it to cure a little more."

"The goats shall multiply if the blood is pure," Gordon said as if reciting the words to some bizarre sermon. The man had a house-ful of books, and being a descendant of Harmon Smith was plenty enough excuse for being a little off.

"Looks like they've done plenty enough multiplying already. You'll need to cull the herd before winter, or you'll be spending a hundred bucks a week on grain. The does have been pretty much in rut nonstop. And you know how the bucks are, they start trying to stick it in anything that moves from the time they're three weeks old."

"The herd is a blessing," Gordon said ripping down ears of corn with both hands and tossing them toward the basket. One ear missed and bounced against the hilled furrow. Odus bent to pick it up, and when he stood, he saw the scarecrow lift its head.

The afternoon sun glinted off the ivory eyes. Before, the head had sagged, as if its owner was weary from a season on the spike, and its eyes had been hidden in the shade of the straw hat's brim.

"Really, Mr. Smith, I think we got plenty."

"What do you think of my new family?" Gordon asked, contin-uing to harvest ears as if hordes of locusts were swarming.

"Miss Katy seems right nice," Odus said. "And your daughter— I mean, your stepdaughter—"

"She's my daughter now," Gordon said. "She's part of this place."

"Well, she seems nice, too. She stands out a little, but she don't seem a bit of trouble to me. You know how kids are, they just need to find their own way in the world."

"They shall be shown the way," Gordon said, lapsing into that sermon-voice of his, but Odus wasn't paying attention. He was watching the scarecrow, expecting it to loosen the ropes that held it to the crossbar, wriggle to the ground, and drag itself off to quench its thirst. The bushel basket was full again, and Gordon stooped and picked it up by its wire handles. "Know them by their works, not by their words," he said.

"Sure, Mr. Smith. Whatever you say."

"I think we've picked enough for today."

Odus hoped his sigh of relief passed for a tired gasp. Gordon would slip him a tax-free twenty and Odus would be doing some slipping of his own, first down the snake-belly road to his caretaker apartment, then down the soft and hazy river of eighty-proof Old Mill Stream.

"But we still need to take down the scarecrow," Gordon said.

The scarecrow's form had slackened again, as if it were made of cloth and silage after all. Odus wasn't in the mood to touch it. This had been Harmon Smith's land, after all, and though the Circuit Rider hadn't been seen in a decade or so, sometimes bad air lin-gered long after a dark cloud had drifted away.

"I've got to be off to Titusville," he lied. "Sarah Jeffers took a spell and she's up in the hospital. I ought to check in on her, seeing as how she got no kin."

"Sorry to hear she's not well." Gordon dumped the bushel bas-ket into the wheelbarrow, which was overflowing with green-wrapped ears of corn, the tassels and tips of the shucks burned brown with frost.

"Come back tomorrow and we'll take care of the scarecrow."

"Sure thing, Mr. Smith. Can you pay cash today instead of sav-ing up my time until Friday?"

"Of course." Gordon removed his gloves and laid them across the staves of the wheelbarrow. He thumbed a twenty from his wal-let and handed it to Odus. As Odus's fingers closed on the money, Gordon grabbed his wrist and pulled him off-balance. Though Odus weighed two hundred pounds, Gordon had leverage and an advantage in both height and weight. Odus found himself looking through the distorted left lens of Gordon's eyeglasses. Again Odus was reminded of the goats, and the professor's pupils seemed to take on that same narrowed and flattened aspect.

"Know them toy their fruits," he said, his breath rank with pipe tobacco and garlic. Odus nodded as Gordon released him, then tucked the money in his pocket and headed toward the gate. He took one last look to make sure the scarecrow still hung on its stake. It did though the ragged brim of its hat was angled even lower, as if the stuffed head had dipped in a prayer of resignation. He climbed in his Blazer and drove away as the goats came down from the pasture to see what Gordon was serving for lunch.

Chapter Nine

Eggs over easy.

That was what Katy was thinking as she went down to the barn, just as the dust from Odus's Blazer settled over the driveway. Gordon had a half dozen guinea hens and they laid little brown eggs almost every day. The nesting boxes were arrayed across the front of the barn, screened with chicken wire tied in a series of hexagons. The nests had little holes carved in the front and were covered with rubber flaps so the gatherer, in this case Katy, could reach an arm into the dark box and feel around in the straw for eggs. Gordon had explained the design discouraged possums, foxes, and other lazy ovum-stealing predators.

But that didn't make Katy feel any better about reaching through those black little curtains that looked all the world like sharp, rotted teeth. At least she didn't have to go inside the barn, where the goats had spooked her and Jett had suffered some sort of delusion.

The farm was too quiet. She'd expected a big change from the city, but she had imagined barking dogs, crowing roosters, badly tuned tractors, and the rattle and clank of distant, rusty machinery. This was autumn. Where were all the chain saws turning hardwood forests into firewood?

The guineas were strangely hushed in their boxes and the goats watched her as they usually did, standing stiff-legged in the field, their beards drifting slightly in the breeze, ears flapping at the flies. In her mind, she imagined them skinned for meat, their oblong pupils regarding her from the slope of their skinned skulls.

She shook the woven basket farther up her left elbow and reached into the first nest. Gordon didn't have names for the hens, so Katy thought of them collectively as "Martha." The first one was M, the second one A, and so on. If they were fryers instead of lay-ing hens, she couldn't bear to name them. It was bad enough just eating their eggs. Even though they were unfertilized, it was hard not to think of the yolks as little abortion victims. She had never considered such a thing before, despite being a lifelong omelet lover. Funny how being on a farm made you more aware of and connected to the food, whether it was the seeds that grew into turnips or the steers that turned into ground round.

"My, M, you must be feeling your oats today," Katy said, find-ing two eggs in the first nest. She laid them gently in the basket as M clucked in either motherly anguish or pea-brained hunger. Katy peered through the chicken-wired slot at A in the next box. All she could see was the serrated, black-and-gray pattern of the hen's feathers. A's head was tucked under one wing, making her look like a soft wad of thrift-shop rags.

"Okay, girl, here I come." Katy reached her arm into the cur-tained slot. She felt around in the straw, finding nothing. Maybe A was sitting on her egg. The hens sometimes did that, driven by an instinct stronger than the memory of all the previous unhatched eggs that had gone before. Katy felt the soft downy feathers of A's chest, then slid her hand underneath.

She nearly broke her wrist snatching her hand free. Something cool and scaly had writhed away from her touch.

It wasn't a chicken leg. This thing had rippled.

Did snakes eat eggs? Could one have crawled through the cur-tain, or dropped onto the wire from above and slithered into A's nest?

Katy didn't know, but she wasn't about to stick her hand in to find out. But what would Gordon say when he saw only two eggs in the refrigerator? He would ask why, and Katy would have to say "Chickenshit." Because she was too chickenshit to stick her hand into the nests. And Gordon's forehead would furrow slightly, ac-companied by a gratuitous, understanding, demeaning smile, all the while his eyes saying, "I thought I'd found a replacement for Rebecca, but all I got was this skinny Irish redhead who can't even pluck an egg, much less a whole chicken."

"Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit," she said to herself. She had placed a moratorium on cussing because she didn't want Jessie picking up the habit, but she was alone and who gave a good god-damn what the goats thought?

She looked around for something to poke into the nest. Maybe if she could get A to move, she would be able to see the snake. Or whatever it was.

God, please let it be a snake, because, sure, they are scary as seven hells, but at least snakes live and breathe and are listed in zoology catalogs.

Katy was about to give up, to go out into the cornfield to find Gordon, when she remembered the pitchfork inside the barn. She hadn't mentioned the scarecrow to Gordon, because he would have laughed. And she had been scared out of her wits by Jett's strange bout of amnesia. And then there was the goat that had somehow locked itself in the loft. The barn was a place to avoid. Nothing good seemed to happen there. Just ask all the livestock that had been slaughtered over that straw-scattered floor, that had been de-capitated and strung up on chains and turned from livestock into deadstock. But the pitchfork was a weapon. If she could hoist a skewered snake before Gordon, show off her grit and determination, then perhaps Gordon would at last accept her as a suitable replacement and draw her into his arms at midnight, accept her and take her and finally make her his wife. Besides, next to a confrontation with a snake, a little trip inside the barn was nothing. The pitchfork was hanging twenty feet from me front sliding doors. She could be in and out with barely enough time to smell the trampled manure. And once she had the pitch-fork, even a goat wouldn't scare her. She set the basket on top of R's nesting box and went to the sliding doors. The oaken, crudely planked doors were suspended on rusty wheels that rolled across a steel track overhead. The left one was partially pulled back, and cool air wafted from the opening. The midmorning sun cut an orange sliver into the darkness, but the great, hulking black beyond gave off an almost palpable weight, like oily water held back by a dam.

Twenty feet. Ten steps max, each way.

She leaned against the edge of the left door and shoved. It slid across its track with a metal scream. The sun poured in at her back like a sacred ally. She was sweating, though the temperature was in the fifties. She looked into the pasture. The goats seemed curious and faintly amused.

"Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit."

Katy squinted into the barn, trying to locate the pitchfork on its wooden-pegged resting place. Twenty feet. She could be there and back before you could say "Children of the Corn, Part Thirteen." Now she saw it, hanging among some coils of rope, a thick length of rusted chain, a strange set of clamps that looked like a medieval torture device, and a crooked-handled scythe whose blade was brown with age. She didn't remember the scythe from before, but it didn't look like an effective weapon against a snake. She stepped into the barn, breath held. Eighteen feet to go. No biggie. Six yards. Not even as far as a first down in football, and she didn't have eleven steroid-inflated males trying to stop her. All she had was her fear.

Another big step and she was on the dividing line between sun and shadow. One of the goats bleated behind her, and it sounded terribly like laughter. Another joined in, and another, and Katy screamed as she ran, "Chickenshit, chickenshit, CHICKENSHIT!" Then she had her hands around the rough, grainy handle of the pitchfork and she was pulling it from the wall and it felt good and right and powerful and she could take on any damned snake in the world and she was already halfway back to the bright square of the barn door when she happened to look up at the wall above the loft stairs. There hung the scarecrow, fully articulated its straw planter's hat resting on the gunnysack head the bone-button eyes catching and reflecting the sun, burning like autumn bonfires, staring bold and red and hellish, and Katy didn't know what she screamed, it may have been "Chickenshiiiiiiiit," but the sound was swallowed by the dry timber of the walls and the hay bales above and the packed dirt below and the pitchfork bounced to the ground and Katy was running across the yard toward the house where Gordon's dead wife might be drifting around the kitchen and tears were streaming down Katy's face, the goats were joined in a chorus of gleeful laughter, a snake was in the henhouse, but all she could think of was the two eggs in the basket, those sad orange yolks and twin chicks that would never be born. Mrs. Stansberry had to stay after school for a meeting, so Jett rode the lame-o school bus home. She sat near the front with the first graders because she didn't want to be teased by Tommy Williamson and Grady Eggers, who sat in the back and ruled their keep like warlords. Grady had toned down a bit since yesterday, when he and Jett had suffered their mutual acid flashback in English class. But Tommy was still Tommy, and he tried to play grab-ass with her whenever she wasn't paying attention and drifted within reach.

The bus was half-empty when it reached her road. She wrestled her book bag down the steps and the bus was pulling away when Tommy called from the rear window, "Hey, shake it for me, Plucky Duck." She flipped a middle finger without looking back, then checked the mail. Phone bill, Mom's October issue of Better Homes & Gardens, a seed catalog, a Honda dealership circular. At the bot-tom of the pile lay a crisp white envelope. She recognized the handwriting right away. Dad's. Jett slipped the letter into a pouch of her backpack, her heart racing. The sun felt brighter and warmer somehow, and the wild-flowers along the ditch were more colorful. She skipped a few steps, scuffing the toes of her black boots on the gravel. The Wards' dog barked at her, and she resumed walking, albeit at a faster pace. She didn't want creepy old Betsy Ward to call to her through the kitchen window. Betsy wasn't inside the house this time. She was down by the little garden shed, holding a pair of hedge clippers. The shed was by the ditch and Jett would have to walk right by her. She kept her eyes on the rocks in the rutted road, wishing she could will herself into invisibility like Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four comics.

"Good news?" Betsy said.

"No, just some magazines," Jett said, figuring she could stop for twenty seconds and go on her way without seeming rude.

"A pretty girl like you shouldn't wear makeup."

Jett had been raised to respect her elders. Except, as Mom had said, when they were obviously full of crap. "Mom says it's okay."

"You come from Charlotte, I hear."

The old woman said it in a knowing manner, as if Charlotte were the only place you could buy black eyeliner and purple hair dye. "I was born there."

"What do you think about Solom?"

Jett shrugged. She saw little point in telling the truth. Betsy probably saw the world beyond the county borders as a strange and unholy land, fraught with terrorists, gangland shootings, adult bookstores, and kids dressed in black. "It's not so bad" she said. "Kind of quiet."

"Be glad of the quiet."

"Well, I'd better get home. My mom's expecting me. Been nice talking to you, Mrs. Ward." Like hell. Jett was already on her way again when Betsy's next words stopped her. "See the horseback preacher yet?"

"Preacher?"

Betsy was grinning like a possum that had just eaten a dozen hen's eggs. "About the time of year for it. He comes galloping into town to grab mean little girls and boys and drag them off to the jan-gling hole up on Lost Ridge."

"Sorry, Mrs. Ward. I don't go in for spook stories."

"You will."

Jett hurried on up the road Betsy Ward's cackle behind her. She couldn't help eyeing the barn on her way to the house. She didn't believe in spooks. She only believed in hallucinations. If she had a joint, she would have sneaked into the bushes and fired it up, despite her promise to Mom. Solom was making her uptight, and she didn't like it. And why be uptight when nature of-fered several substances that served no other purpose but providing artificial relaxation? And where nature came up short, chemists had picked up the slack and come up with a whole alphabet soup of drugs. She had never tried ecstasy or angel dust, but those sub-stances had floated around the big consolidated schools of Charlotte.

Good one, birdbrain. Try to kill the anxiety of a drug-induced hallucination by taking more drugs. Sort of like drinking yourself sober. Sounds like something Dad would dream up. Instead of running from her problems, she could face them head-on. March right into the barn and up those stairs into the loft, hammering the hell out of her boot heels so the monster or the seven-foot-tall creep or the carniverous goat would know she was coming and—

Actually, the joint was starting to sound better and better. But she didn't know how to score in this backwoods tractor graveyard. She'd probably have to be friends with rednecks like Tommy Williamson if she ever wanted any connections. The thought made her shudder.

Mom's Subaru was in the driveway, as usual. Mom was becom-ing a real homebody, a turn for the weird. "We don't have to change who we are," Mom had said, when convincing Jett that marriage would be a positive move for both of them.

Except the drugs would have to go. That was part of the deal, and the part Jett felt responsible for. She wondered how much of Mom's hasty decision to marry was fueled by a desire to whisk her daughter away from the big-city lifestyle and the accompanying bad influences she had collected. Jett was surprised she didn't miss most of her friends, but instead of seeing her dad every weekend, she had only seen him once since the move.

But she had the letter...

Jett was starting up the flagstone walk when a bleat erupted be-hind her. A goat stood by the wire fence, gnawing on a locust post. The green irises glittered in the afternoon sun, the boxy pupils fixed on her. Like it was sizing her up. Inviting her into the loft.

"No way, Joshua boy," she said, louder than she wanted.

She backed the rest of the way up the walk and onto the porch, not letting the goat out of her sight. Just before she opened the door, she glanced at the barn. A figure stood in the upper window, in tattered clothes, face lost in the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat. Jett slipped inside the house and slammed the door closed, then leaned against it, trying to catch her breath.

"Honey?" Katy called from the kitchen. "Is that you?" Jett didn't trust her voice enough to answer. Instead, she eased the backpack off her shoulder and peeked through the curtains at the barn. Nothing. Even the goat had turned away and ambled up to a tangle of blackberry vines.

A for-Christ's-sake flashback. Acid bouncing back like a cos-mic boomerang to whack her on the ass.

"Jett?" Katy appeared in the kitchen doorway, wet dough nearly up to her elbows.

"Hi. What are you making?" Jett forced a smile, an expression she'd avoided since getting braces. A grimace went well with her glum Goth look.

Katy looked down at her hands as if surprised to find them coated in white goo. "Chicken and dumplings, 1 think. And scratch biscuits."

"Cookbook?"

Katy shrugged. "An old family recipe. I found it in the pantry." Jett nodded. When they first moved she and Mom had a long talk about Rebecca, Gordon's first wife. Mom insisted she would-n't try to replace Rebecca. Mom was sure Gordon would appreci-ate her for who she was, and she might not be the world's greatest homemaker, but she was willing to try. "I'll never be the next Rebecca Smith, but I'll be the first Katy Logan, and that's the best Gordon could hope for," Mom had said.

Except a little of the sparkle had faded from Mom's eyes, and she seemed a little shaken today. Jett felt a pang of guilt for even thinking of breaking her promise to stay clean. Katy had enough to worry about. Like whatever was causing that smoke in the kitchen.

"I think your biscuits are done," Jett said.

Chapter Ten

The dinner table was made of ancient oak, the legs hand-carved by some distant Smith ancestor. It wobbled slightly when Katy put her elbows on it. She caught Jett's eye and frowned. Jett was star-ing off into space, right in the middle of Gordon's blessing. Then Katy realized her own eyes were open, and she turned her attention back to the lump of mashed potatoes. The potatoes were a bad choice with the dumplings. The meal appeared gray and bland even with the pink meat of the chicken stirred among the dumpling juice. At least they had fresh broccoli, and Katy was grateful for the hardy crop that continued growing through the early frosts.

"... and may the Lord bless this bounty placed before us, and the hands that prepared it," Gordon said, in a voice Katy imagined he used when delivering a lecture to half-asleep sophomores. "Amen."

"Amen," Katy said.

Gordon flipped out his cloth napkin with a flourish. Katy had never used cloth napkins in Charlotte, considering them an extrav-agance, the kind of thing that led to a premium charge at a fancy restaurant. But Gordon had showed her the drawer that held the table linens, and explained how Rebecca had always kept three clean sets of the same off-white color. He didn't exactly order Katy to lay out cloth napkins with each dinner, but if Rebecca was able to do it, then why shouldn't Katy? So what if it meant extra laundry and another three minutes of her day wasted?

"These dumplings look plumb delicious," Gordon said. He speared a lump of cooked dough with his fork, brought it to his nose, and sniffed. He took a bite.

Jett picked up a sprig of broccoli with her fingers, tossed it into her mouth, and began chewing noisily. Katy didn't even think to ask Jett to mind her manners because she was so intent on Gordon's reaction.

"Mmm," Gordon said. "Acceptable. Most acceptable indeed." Acceptable? What in the hell did that mean? That Rebecca's were better? But all she said was, "I'm glad you like them, dear."

"Maybe we should tell him about the scarecrow now," Jett said.

"Scarecrow?" Gordon reached for the white wine. Katy would never have dared select a suitable wine. She was a gin girl, at least on her infrequent opportunities to imbibe. Since Jett's drug prob-lems began, though, she had denied herself the dubious pleasure of alcohol. Gordon didn't seem to care about intoxication. He rarely drank more than a glass or two. To him, it was an affectation, like his pipe, the requisite habit of a tenured scholar.

"The scarecrow in the barn," Katy said.

"Oh, that old thing? What about it?"

"Yesterday, it was out in the cornfield. Now it's hanging on the wall."

"Maybe Odus Hampton brought it in. He was doing some work for me a few days ago, while you guys were shopping in Windshake."

"It was on the wall, then it was gone yesterday. And it was back again today." Katy didn't want to tell the other part, about how the goat had dragged it away, about how she thought it had moved under its own power. And how it must have put itself together, climbed the wall, and snagged itself on the hook again.

"Just like the story you told us," Jett said. She didn't seem as en-amored of Katy's dumplings as Gordon was. She worked on the broccoli and her milk, then dipped into the bowl of cinnamon apple slices that Katy had prepared as a side dish.

"The scarecrow boy," Gordon said breaking into a grin. His cheeks were flushed from the wine.

"I saw it, too," Jett said. "The night I"—she shot a glance at Katy—"freaked out in the barn." Gordon's eyes narrowed, and Katy saw a hint of cruelty in his lace. "You haven't been messing with drugs, have you? I thought I made it clear to your mother that I wouldn't tolerate that business in my house. It's bad enough you have to go around dressed like a prostitute at a funeral." Jett slumped in her chair, jaw tightening. She fingered the stud-ded leather band around her throat as if it were cutting off her oxy-gen.

"Gordon, please," Katy said.

Gordon sipped his wine. "Rebecca would never have allowed such foolishness, God rest her soul."

"Jett's not doing drugs anymore," Katy said. "She promised. We both promised." Gordon patted his lips with the cloth napkin, and Katy won-dered if she'd have to spray Spot Shot on it later. "Sorry. That was-n't fair. I did accept you for better or worse, after all." Katy flashed a pained smile at Jett as if to say, See, I told you he's not so bad. We all just have to get used to each other. Except part of her was thinking, If Rebecca was so wonderful, why didn't she bear Gordon a perfect child, one who wasn't individual and human and as achingly beautiful as Jett?

She squeezed her own napkin under the table until her fingers hurt. Jett said, "It's okay, Gordon. No sweat."

Gordon didn't know Jett well enough to detect the sullen defeat in her voice. Gordon raised one eyebrow at Katy in a When is she going to start calling me Dad? expression. Katy wondered when they were going to quit communicating in unspoken words and ac-tually talk to one another. But that was silly, because Gordon wouldn't even talk to her in bed when the lights were out and her heart was beating hard with expectation. Perhaps Rebecca had suf-fered the same neglect. The thought brought a sudden smirk to her face.

Jett pushed her plate away. "I've got homework, folks."

"You didn't finish," Gordon said.

"I'm not hungry."

Jett stood, her chair scraping across the floor. The sound cut the silence like a scythe through a tin can. Katy waited to see how the power struggle would play out, praying she wouldn't have to take sides, mentally exploring a way to broker a peace settlement.

"You shouldn't waste what God's blessing has brought to our table," Gordon said.

"I'll put it in the fridge and she can have it for a snack after school tomorrow," Katy said.

"I don't want it tomorrow," Jett said.

"Honey, we've all had a long day," Katy said. "Why don't you go do your homework and we'll be up to talk about it later?"

She knew Gordon wouldn't join in on the talk. He had rarely been in Jett's room, apparently considering it some sort of den of iniquity. Rock posters, a black light, a tarantula in a small aquar-ium, melancholy music playing constantly, at least while Gordon was home. No, Gordon hadn't yet reached out to his stepdaughter, though he expected automatic respect by sole virtue of Jett's resi-dence under his roof.

"Sure, Mom." Jett left the room and Katy took her first taste of the chicken and dumplings. Too salty. Rebecca's recipe had called for two tablespoons. Or was it teaspoons? The recipes were hand-written, and Katy could easily have made a mistake.

"Do you really like them?" Katy asked.

Gordon was staring out the window at the darkness that had set-tled on the farm as they ate. The crickets chirped, katydids rubbed their wings together, and moths fluttered against the window screen.

"They were fine," Gordon said absently.

"Can we get rid of the scarecrow?"

"The scarecrow?"

"The one in the barn."

"What about it?"

"I don't like it hanging in the barn. It spooks me."

Gordon laughed. "That's been in the family for years. I put it up for the winter so it doesn't rot."

"I thought you said Odus Hampton put it up."

"Yeah. I guess he did."

"It's out there now. I saw it."

Gordon reached across the table and took her hand. He smiled, his eyes bright, cheeks crinkling in the manner that had first at-tracted her. "Let's forget about the silly scarecrow."

"You shouldn't be so hard on Jett."

Gordon drew his hand away. "It's just that I care about her. About both of you. I want you to be happy here."

Katy was about to say she would be a lot happier if she didn't feel the invisible presence of his first wife. But as she opened her mouth, a brittle clatter arose from the kitchen and something broke on the floor.

"Sounds like you have some work to do," Gordon said.

David Tester cut over Lost Ridge, taking the shortest route from his house to the church. Though it was dark, David knew the path well and carried a flashlight. An owl hooted in the unseen treetops and other nocturnal animals scurried on their way to put up winter supplies. The leaves were still crisp underfoot, though dew was starting to settle on the ground. A sodden wedge of moon tried to break through the canopy overhead.

He was on the upper edge of the Smith property, a forested hill-top that Harmon Smith had owned and that now belonged to Gordon Smith. Rush Branch started as a trickle between some worn granite boulders near the peak, but gathered momentum and a few stray springs before churning into a frothing waterway by the church. Harmon Smith had deeded property for the church, though the original log building had been torn down and replaced after the turn of the last century. Harmon had ridden his horse over this very trail, had slid off the saddle for a sermon many times before mounting up and heading to neighboring counties. This walk had be-come something of a pilgrimage for David, as if he expected to find an answer to the mysteries of the Circuit Rider, faith, and love lying along the trail. Too bad Gordon took only Smith's surname and none of the fer-vid passionate blood. Primitive Baptists didn't have the duty of saving souls, but the preacher had to tend his flock all the same. David knew the weight of that responsibility. His brother Ray had disowned him because of it and had taken up with the Free Willers. Maybe Ray needed the little extra comfort that came from bringing the Lord into your heart. But Ray was born to believe he already had a place waiting in heaven, whether he forgot it or not.

David played the flashlight over the trail, dodging the snakelike roots of oak and buckeye. Walking this trail had always soothed him and rejuvenated him, as if he were drawing on the spirit of those who had served before him. Walking right, that was the ticket. Following the path. Occasionally an acorn or nut slapped through the leaves and bounced silently on the ground near him. The woods had the earthy scent of loam and the salamander smell of muddy springs. David came to a strand of hog wire and knew he had reached the corner of Gordon's pasture. The professor's flock was made up entirely of goats. That said plenty about the current state of the Harmon Smith legacy.

"Don't be bitter, now," David said to himself. "Gordon likely has a place in heaven the same as everybody else."

That was one of the things that bothered David about predesti-nation. If the Lord already knew you were going to be worthy of eternal reward why did he make you go through the whole works? Why didn't he just beam your soul straight up to heaven from your mother's belly? But that would make God little more than a parody of Scotty from the old Star Trek show. So God had to want something more. He laid out tests for you. David wondered if even thinking about God's plan was somehow wrong, the kind of sin that wasn't written about in the Bible. David climbed across the fence. His boot hung in a bottom strand of wire as he planted it on the far side, causing him to lose his balance. The flashlight fell to the ground and the beam flick-ered and died. David hung on top of the waist-high fence, the top wire digging into his upper leg. He righted himself and tried to free his boot. A wetness trickled down his left hand, and he felt the first burning of a cut. Something scuffed the leaves twenty yards to his right, inside the pasture. The moon glinted off the flashlight's metal switch. David reached down from the top of the fence for the flashlight, but it was just beyond his fingertips. He stood up again, the wire yawing back and forth between the support posts. He yanked his stuck boot, but one of the eye hooks must have been caught on a stray sprig of rusted steel.

Crackling leaves heralded the approach of something big. There was little to fear in the mountains except rabid animals. All the large predators like mountain lions had died out along with the buffalo and elk that had fed them. Black bears might attack if threatened, but David didn't feel very threatening with his foot stuck and his crotch riding the thin line of the fence top. He swung his free leg over and planted it on the ground, giving a painful twist to the ankle of the trapped foot.

Now his back was turned to the approaching creature. David twisted his neck and almost laughed.

"What in tarnation are you doing out here?" David said. "Trying to figure out who's trespassing?" The goat stood ten feet away, head lowered, the bottom half of the face lost in shadows. Its emerald eyes glittered in the muted moonlight.

"The Lord's Prayer says forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." The goat lifted its nose and sniffed at the air as if it couldn't care less about the Lord's Prayer. The wicked curves of its horns sug-gested it was a billy buck. Though the horns were angled flat against the slope of the animal's skull, they had the look of serious business. Goats butted heads as a mating ritual, or used their horns to drive away predators like foxes, bobcats, or wild dogs. But they didn't attack people. David put his free foot beside the stuck one and tried to jimmy the wire. He was sweating from the exertion. After a few seconds of struggling, he sat down, scooted himself close to the boot, and began unlacing it Maybe once his foot was free, he could work the boot loose. Now he could see the cut on his hand, the blood black in the weak light. It would need a heavy bandage, maybe stitches. Served him right, walking in the dark like that. Even though he thought of the trail as a sacred path, that didn't mean it wasn't treacherous. Rattlesnakes lived in the granite crevices along the ridge, and it was easy to trip over a root or stone and break a leg. Out here, he might not be found for days if he became immobilized. And it wasn't like the Lord cast down a holy beacon to show the way. No, this wasn't a test. Just too much tread on a Timberland workman's boot. As his fingers loosened the square knot, he looked back at the goat. It was three feet away now, and its strong musky scent filled his nostrils. Goats were such nasty, stubborn animals. David didn't understand their growing popularity among local farmers, no mat-ter how exotic goat cheese and goat meat sounded to people raised on beef and beans.

"Just be glad the Lord doesn't require sacrifices like he used to," David said. "Abraham would have you up on a rock altar right now, a blade against that stringy neck of yours." The goat bent its head down and stepped forward the dark cloven hoof landing right next to David's thigh. The animal panted its breath rank with half-digested goldenrod and maple leaves. The elongated face swung near David's cheek, the tangled beard whisk-ing across his shoulder. The goat sniffed the black nostrils flaring, the queer, oblong pupils fixed on David.

"Go away, boy. Aren't you supposed to be in the barn or some-thing?" The animal sniffed the length of David's arm.

"Get," David said louder now, almost angry.

And if he dared to admit it, a little scared.

The goat drew back a step. Saliva sparkled on the protruding lips.

David tore at the bootlaces, sweat stinging his eyes. The goat moved in again, this time going lower on his arm. The animal's tongue darted out and licked at his hand.

The cut hand.

The rough tongue slid out again, this time lingering on the flesh below the pad of his thumb where the cut was deepest.

It was drinking his blood.

It's sweet, David told himself. And the goat's thirsty. That's all. Nonetheless, David jerked the two sides of his boot apart, yanked his foot free, and scrambled back over the fence.

He studied the goat, which licked at the leaves, searching for spilled drops of David's juice. The animal glanced up and let its tongue loll, as if inviting David back over to its side of the fence. David turned and ran, the sock on one foot flopping out beyond his toes. Branches tore at his face as he plunged through the dark woods. The church visit could wait until sunrise. And, Harmon Smith's sacred path or not, next time David would make the trip over gravel and asphalt, in the cab of a Chevy pickup truck.