"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 dealing 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 scarecrow. 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 trying 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 vegetation probably smelled like a gourmet feast to the goat. Katy climbed three steps, stopping on a warped tread to watch the encounter.
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 approached 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 lifting 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 daylight letting her mind run wild. What if a stoned-out Jett had wandered 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 themselves 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 roofing 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
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 foundation, trading and bartering for stock, even breeding their own workforce. They were Jewish but no one paid that any mind, because they kept closed services in their living room and the store remained open on both Saturdays and Sundays.