You ever seen something like that?
He drank a few beers in DeLand and tried to prepare himself to take Dixie Witte seriously, to grant her the patience and respect that Lauren hadn’t believed he was capable of showing to someone who claimed psychic abilities.
You’ve got to let her be herself, Mark thought. Do not challenge her or dismiss her. Not at the start, at least. Just get her talking.
When he returned to Cassadaga it was past dusk, and the lack of streetlights enhanced that sense of driving out of one era and into another. He passed Dixie’s house, noted the continued absence of the red truck, and then checked the park by the lake, which also remained empty. He left the Infiniti there, not wanting to make it easy for Myron to find him if he came back loaded up on painkillers or meth or whatever the hell made a guy like him tick. When he was sure that nobody had followed him or was watching, he got out of the car and began the walk back to the property once owned by a man who’d had his hands severed and placed in a cigar box.
The streets were empty and the moon hung in a perfect crescent and you could see a good number of stars for inland Florida, but he’d never seen stars in his life the way he’d seen them growing up amid the high peaks and open plains. Once on a dive boat on open water, there’d been something close, perhaps. Lauren had been with him then. That was in the Saba National Marine Park. He still carried her dive permit from that trip with him, putting it in his pocket every day, a talisman.
The afternoon rain had been swept away by a steady western wind and though the sun was down the temperature continued to rise. The moist streets steamed. The main house, Myron’s den, was dark, but there were lights on inside the guesthouse where Dixie waited. When Mark stepped inside the fence, the wind seemed to die. He looked around and saw fronds moving in all directions, and overhead, a clump of Spanish moss that looked like a dead woman’s hair waved steadily, buffeted by a breeze that he could no longer feel. The air around him was as still as a tomb and he could hear again that odd sound that seemed to come from inside his own skull, the dull popping of a rubber band.
He shook his head, readjusted, and that was when he saw his dead wife on the porch of the main house.
For a moment, a long and fine moment, he was certain that it was Lauren. She was standing in a pool of moonlight that silhouetted her lean frame and behind her, banyan leaves threw shadows that climbed into the starlit sky. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top, and her blond hair just reached her shoulders. The visual cues were close, yes, but they were also generic. The catch-your-breath quality was in presence. There was just something about the way she stood, about the quarter tilt of her head as she looked at him, that said Lauren.
Then she stepped forward, off the porch and down into the yard, and the motion broke loose the bizarre sensation in his mind and he understood that this was a living woman and not a specter. She was holding something in her hands that looked like a bucket. “Who’s there?” she said, and her voice was not even close to Lauren’s. Mark shouldn’t have needed that confirmation, but for some reason, in this place, he did.
“Markus Novak. I’m here to see Dixie.”
“I’m Dixie. And you’re early, Markus.”
He didn’t respond, couldn’t. She walked toward him with confidence, and suddenly, foolishly, he wanted to have his gun in hand. When she got close enough that he could see her face clearly, it was obvious that she didn’t look that much like Lauren. Her features were more delicate, almost fragile, and her lips were fuller, at odds with the bone structure, mismatched. There was a dimple in her chin, and her ears were lined with piercings, small silver hoops that ran from bottom to top. Up close, nobody would confuse them. But from a distance…he was still rattled from that moment in the moonlight.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” she said. She was holding a metal bucket filled with ice and four glistening bottles of Dixie beer.
Mark nodded at them and said, “Brand loyalty, I see.”
“What? Oh. Dixie. Right. No, that’s just my preference. I was going to go for a walk. Shall we walk and talk? I prefer to conduct readings in the house, but you’re not here for a reading. You’re here for her.”
“Her?”
“Your wife,” Dixie Witte said simply. “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize your name? Honestly, I’ve wondered what took you so long. I’m afraid that she has too.”
Mark couldn’t think of anything to say to that, because there was an element of it that seemed like the truth.
“Let’s walk,” Dixie said after a pause. “We aren’t going far, but the energy is better. I’ll need good energy for this talk. You understand,” she said, handing him the bucket. “Here. Carry this, please.”
She headed down the street with a confident sway of her slim hips. She kept her stride fast enough to stay a full step ahead of Mark as he followed, holding the metal bucket, which sloshed water from the melted ice over his hands and numbed his fingers. Everything was still and silent and the lush smells of the oranges and rhododendrons were everywhere. In front of the moon, the scudding remnants of the storm clouds broke, re-formed, and then separated again like wet cotton.
They passed beside a still lake, not unlike the one into which Mark had thrown Myron Pate’s keys earlier, but Dixie didn’t stop or slow. They looped away from the park, went up the road toward the Cassadaga Hotel, and then they left the pavement and walked into a small garden.
“Medicine Wheel,” she said.
Mark froze. Every muscle tensed; every nerve hummed. He could hardly breathe.
“What did you say?”
“That’s what this park is called.” She sat on the low back of a small stone bench, her feet resting on the seat.
Mark looked around the dark park and tried to find his natural voice, one that didn’t betray the eerie spark he’d felt. “Officially?”
“What do you mean, officially? That’s its name; I didn’t make it up. There’s a plaque that says it.” She shrugged. “What’s it matter to you?”
What did it matter to him? He looked at her and thought about a flat mountain summit in the Bighorn range in Wyoming where rocks were laid out in twenty-eight piles that matched the lunar cycle, rocks that had been there for hundreds of years, their origin unknown but still lined up perfectly with the sunrise of the summer solstice. Rocks that were sacred to tribal nations from all over the West and where people still came daily to honor their own mix of gods, leaving behind feathers and brightly colored cloths and bits of bone and even the hair of the dead. His mother had been arrested there when she’d shown up and tried her Nez Perce spirit-guide act.
That had been one of the more lasting shames in a childhood full of them, but it was also one of the most vivid, because he’d experienced something in that spot. Something not understood, only felt. He had felt, standing on that windy peak and watching people speak in unknown tongues and worship in ways he didn’t comprehend, that he was a part of something beyond himself.
And then the rangers came for his mother, and they brought handcuffs. He would never forget the eyes of the grieving couple she’d been working with.
Now, twenty-five years later and three thousand miles away, he shook his head and said, “It’s a strange name, that’s all,” and advanced to the bench where Dixie Witte was sitting. Something metal glittered in her hand and for an instant Mark thought, Knife, before he realized it was a bottle opener. She beckoned with her free hand, and he set the bucket down in the grass and passed her a sweating bottle of beer. She popped the cap and handed it to him and then he gave her another, which she opened and kept. She looked at him with a sad smile.