Some of the goats danced out of the way, their long, angular faces almost comical with those obscene eyes set deep beneath heavy brows. Katy navigated an arc, parking the passenger's-side door at the foot of the porch steps. She leaned over and flung the door open as Jett hopped toward the car. Gordon looked shattered, as if he wanted to cry but couldn't find any water in his dried-up heart. Katy would almost have felt sorry for him, but she was pretty sure he was distraught over the dead and injured goats and not over losing his wife.
"Shit, Mom, you rock," Jett said as she climbed into the front seat. Katy was already pulling away before the door closed.
The goats had by now figured out a monstrous steel predator was in their midst, and they had parted like the waves of the Red Sea.
"Moses," Katy said. "Did he have a goat named Moses?"
"That one," Jett said, pointing to the left. "The one with the black hairs in its beard."
Katy veered out of the way and clipped Moses head-on. The goat bounced up on the hood and pressed against the windshield. For one horrifying second, Moses glared through the glass at Katy, as if admonishing her for breaking some unwritten commandment. Then he rolled to the side and was flung from the car, which was by now halfway down the drive to the Ward house. When Katy checked the mirror, Moses was flopping and flailing on the hard-packed road.
"Sweet!" Jett yelled, as if this were a sequel to Thelma and Louise, only this time cowritten by Federico Fellini and George Romero.
"Fasten your seat belt," Katy said, her hands no longer trembling. She hadn't had time to be frightened-well, not such a much of it-but now the reverse endorphins were kicking in and the blood drained from her face, her bruised eye throbbing.
"I saw your ghost," Jett said after obeying the parental command. She put her backpack in the floor between her legs, opened it, and rummaged while Katy aimed for the paved highway.
"It's not my ghost," Katy said. "I'm still very much alive, thank you."
Jett pulled a CD from her backpack, opened the case, and slid it into the player. She punched a button and Paul Westerberg's "Knockin on Mine" blared from the speakers like a bad attitude in A major.
Neither of them noticed the ghost sitting in the backseat, its head in its lap.
Sue parked the Jeep beneath a stand of balsam, gnarled trees whose bones had been bleached white by acid rain and foreign pests. A number of native tree species were in decline because of exotic diseases that had been brought to the country from Asia, usually piggybacking on landscaping plants. Human vanity had led to this imbalance of nature, as it did to most imbalances. The regional tourist economy, and Sue's personal economy, was threatened by the damage to scenic beauty.
Perhaps Harmon Smith, the Circuit Rider, was another such blight, invading a realm where he didn't belong. The Circuit Rider was just as much a threat, because he couldn't be caged and put on display at five bucks a head. Instead, he literally killed her customers, if indeed he had done away with the Everharts while they were cycling. Plus, somebody had to pay for the damage to the bicycles. Though the Circuit Rider couldn't pay in a pound of flesh, Sue hoped to extract some sort of substance.
"Ready to rock and roll?" she said, looking over at Sarah. Maybe ancient wisdom had something on the brashness of youth, because Sarah gripped the safety bar on the dash in front of her and stared straight ahead at the woods.
"I don't know why you brung me along," the storekeeper said. "If I was meant to take care of Harmon Smith, I expect I'd have done it many moons ago."
Sue brandished the pickax, letting it catch the last rays of sunlight. "Maybe you didn't have the right tool."
"And what in tarnation am I supposed to do with that? Hammer it into his heart like he's some kind of ass-backwards vampire?"
"I think we'll know when the time comes. I'm just flying by the seat of my pants here."
"You act like you've done this kind of thing before."
Sue flicked the headlights, strobing the silent trees. "No, I just don't want to be waiting for the next time Harmon Smith decides to come around. Solom is my home now."
"You younguns are so full of piss and vinegar. It's a wonder any of you ever live to be old."
"Well, Miss Jeffers, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but if the people of Solom had faced this problem right at the start, maybe it would all be over by now."
Sarah's voice broke, nearly becoming an old woman's whine. "We couldn't figure out what he wanted. We figured he'd just come to claim somebody and that was that, and each time he went away, the ones who weren't picked just counted their blessings and went about their business. That might be the worst of it all. Because, until he comes back again and you start seeing the people he killed, you somehow manage to forget"
Sue wrestled a flashlight from beneath her seat and flung open her door. "Well, nobody's forgetting this time."
"I hope it ain't you," Sarah said. "But 1 hope it ain't me, either, and if it does turn out to be one of us, I'd rather he carry you over. Nothing personal, mind you."
Sue almost smiled despite the knot in her stomach. Her bravery was mostly false, but Sarah was clearly shaken, and Sue felt a need to be strong for both of them. She believed Harmon Smith would be impressed by a lack of fear. She went to Sarah's door and helped her out, then played the flashlight around beneath the dark canopy of the forest.
"Where to now?" Sue asked.
"Right here," came a voice from the trees.
When Mark Draper arrived at the Smith house, both vehicles were gone from the driveway. He knocked on the front door with no answer, then walked around the house. He didn't know how Gordon Smith would react to trespassing, but a tingling at the base of Mark's skull told him something was wrong. After hearing Jett's stories and seeing the dead boy in the waterwheel, he was willing to believe his paranoia was real and not a side effect of the cocaine.
Mark was about to drive back to the general store to call the sheriff's department when he saw the barn. The doors were swung wide, and the gate was open. Twin tire tracks led into the old wooden structure, and the tracks looked fresh. That was where Jett had been attacked by the scarecrow and the goats, and he figured he'd at least take a peek. He owed her that much. He hadn't believed her this morning. Now he realized, maybe for the first time in his life, that he expected her to lie. Because she'd learned it from him. Along with other bad habits. His failure cast a bigger ripple than a mere broken marriage and a troubled childhood, because Jett would be carrying that bad karma with her even when Mark was worm food.
As he approached the gate, he noticed splotches of blood on the gravel driveway. The blood led into the barn.
"Shit," Mark said, breaking into a jog even though his knees were trembling. Dusk seemed to settle more heavily with each step, and the dark heart of the barn beckoned him like a carnival funhouse. Chickens emitted clucks from a row of cages along the front of the barn, and in the otherwise brooding silence, the clamor added to his uneasiness. What if the blood were Jett's? And what if something had happened to her just because he didn't believe her?
The wet drops reflected in the scant light that leaked through the doors and windows. Mark followed them to a set of narrow wooden stairs, where the drops were larger and stood out like black paint against the gray, bleached boards. Mark hesitated only a second, making sure none of the goats that Jett had talked about were around.