We don’t lack for criminal types in the piney woods. There has been more than one bank robber or murderer lost forever in our woods, fields, and old abandoned houses. And even now bodies turn up in the oddest places. Too often the killers are never found....
The stout walls, built of heart-pine, had been under attack by weather and insects for a decade. The roof had begun to sag, and the porch steps were a sift of sawdust left by the invading termites. Hawthorn and privet bushes had run wild, and berry vines had thrust questing fingers into every possible crevice.
Only dust moved inside, except for an occasional roach and the omnipresent spiders in the corners. Even vandals and couples looking for a place to make out did not go there.
What had happened ten years before had left its mark on the minds of locals, and it was not the sort of matter that country people can forget.
The furniture was still in place, veiled with cobweb and dust, for not even a thief had entered the place. An occasional breeze, gusting through broken panes, fluttered the webs, shaking down more dust that danced in the sun rays slanting through cracks in the walls.
It didn’t seem likely that anyone would ever come there again.
* * * * * * *
Harper felt the impact of the slug even before he realized he had heard the shot. It knocked him sideways into a tangle of sawvine, which was lucky for him and fatal for Seldane. He rolled to come up on his belly, the revolver bulky in his grip. As Seldane looked over the bush behind which he had taken cover, Harper shot him through the head.
The sharp echoes died away into the woods, and he knew that nobody was nearer than five miles who might hear them. For the first time since they had pulled the bank job two hours ago, he was safe. And now the money was his, all of it. It was only right—he hadn’t been the one to try to backshoot his partner.
Blood was sticky in his shirt—he was hit just below his left armpit, but the bullet had angled away from his chest. It seemed to have torn a hole in the muscle as it exited the wound, but he knew what to do about that. Korea had taught him a lot, and ’Nam had finished his education. He tore up his shirt and packed it into the worst of the holes, reducing the bleeding, as far as he could tell, to a minimum. Once he thought he wouldn’t bleed to death, he crawled out of the vines and went to examine Seldane. The briefcase lay beside him in the pine straw—forty thousand dollars was inside it, still undivided, and now not to be. All his.
Small banks might not keep millions of dollars on hand, but they didn’t have much security. On balance, they made far better marks than bigger, richer banks did.
He hadn’t begun to hurt yet, though his head felt a bit light and the wood was tilting a bit from time to time. He hefted the briefcase in his good hand, after stuffing the gun into his belt. He followed the dim path that was supposed to lead to the spot where Seldane had stashed the second car. The first was ditched in a ravine, several miles behind off a logging road.
Harper felt a tiny regret that he no longer had Seldane to guide him through the forest. This was his partner’s neck of the woods—he knew the trails through the thickets as only a native country boy could, and already Harper was feeling confused. He came to a fork in the path. Each track, leading into the shadows of the trees, looked equally abandoned and unpromising. He couldn’t recall Seldane’s mentioning a fork, and he certainly hadn’t expected to need such information. Now he had to choose.
“Eeny-meeny-minie-mo,” he chanted aloud. His voice sounded odd, and he thought he must be feeling the wound and the blood loss more than he suspected. He turned right, through a stand of hickories. The path slanted down toward a creek that ran through gray-barked birches and ranks of cattails. He sloshed through the water, feeling mud ooze into his loafers, and smelling the thick greenish stink of stagnant muck. Seldane had said nothing about a creek!
The light grew dimmer, and he shook his head to clear his vision. Then he realized that the sun was getting low beyond the thick stands of pine and hickory and oak. Straight up, the sky was still bright, but in the forest it was already twilight.
The path ended in a swamp. Button willows leaned over green pools, and cypresses that seemed too fat to be healthy thrust their trunks and knees up from the ooze. He’d been following a logging track! But where was the back road where the car was waiting?
He began to sweat—or was it blood soaking through the packing and trickling down his skin? He turned and hurried along the path to find the fork. It was even darker, as he took a turn onto what he hoped was the right track. In two hundred yards, he emerged onto a dirt road, barely one vehicle’s width, whose ruts were almost grown over with weeds.
God! He had been afraid he would miss it! But where was the car? There was no parallel track among the overgrowth—it had to be farther down the road. Right? Left?
He went right for some distance, with no result. Then he retraced his steps and went the other way. Nothing. Where was the damned car?
Now it was really getting dark. He was also becoming weak and dizzy. He had to find someplace to hole up for the night. Stumbling around blindly would never get him to the car. He staggered along, brushing through the bushes that were trying to lean across the track. But up ahead he saw a break in the row of trees and brush. Though the sun was down, streaks of pink and orange still hung in the west, and he could just see the glint of rosy light off a tin roof. The break was a driveway, though weeds and vines had grown over it.
An empty house. Just what he needed!
He stepped into the brambles, trying not to leave too plain a trail. He had no doubt that deputies and what-not would be searching the countryside in the next few days. Probably they’d have choppers and dogs. He had seen it before, though never from the wrong end of things.
It was too bad he hadn’t found the car. He could be out of the state before the law got its act together. That was why he and Seldane had picked a town so near the Louisiana line for this operation.
He found that things were going hazy. He was suddenly on hands and knees in the stickery mass that was the drive. As it seemed too much trouble to walk, he crawled, though it was murder on his hands. Things kept going into and out of focus, as he struggled toward the house. In one of his lucid moments, he realized that he was in trouble, but the thought wouldn’t stay with him. He sighed and forced his way forward, stopping only when he butted into the sagging sill of the porch. When he opened his eyes it was darker, but he was staring into the total blackness beneath the house. A stone block held up the corner of the porch, and he used it to pull himself up, after heaving the briefcase onto the flimsy planking.
The boards sagged. Dead leaves and grit rustled beneath him, as he moved toward the gaping doorway. A sawvine had sent a runner over the porch and into the open door, and he had to push aside the stickery tangle before he could get inside.
It was like going into a cave. The last of the light from the sky was gone, and before he knew that furniture still cluttered the room, he bumped himself sharply. “Got to have light,” he muttered, holding onto his wits with difficulty. “See...what’s...what.”
The room was a mess. His lighter was all but out of fluid, and the space was only a dim cave. Cobwebs criss-crossed it, and chairs were tumbled this way and that as if there had been a free-for-all there before it was abandoned. Something scuttered in a corner, invisible in the blackness.
“Not a good place for a sick man,” he said. “Feels like a tomb. A blasted tomb.” The words echoed through the invisible rooms.
He hauled himself upright, holding onto the heavy armchair he had bumped last. The room was full of bulky shapes. Why hadn’t people taken what they wanted from this house?
He stumbled forward, found a mantel. It was thick with dust, but his seeking hands found a candlestick, with a length of candle left in it. Dusty strands dripped from the wick, but he flicked his lighter and lit it. It sputtered and smoked, trails of sparks running down the threads of web, but it caught well at last. The tiny light seemed very bright, after the unsteady flicker of the lighter.
Harper set his briefcase of money on the sofa sagging beside the fireplace. He looked around, finding that a table at the back of the room still held dishes, set as if for a meal. If people had left in such a hurry, he realized, they might have left canned goods in the kitchen.
He lifted the candle and moved toward the door at the back of the room. A strip of something was draped across the table holding the dishes—a streamer with printing on it:
KEEP OUT
POLICE CRIME INVESTIGATION IN PROGRESS
He shivered. Something really nasty had happened here. There had been a body. He had seen strips like that out in the woods, when corpses had been found and the law had searched.
But solid country folks didn’t have such things happen. Surely someone had found this strip and brought it home as a curiosity.
He stumbled into the other room, a kitchen with an old-fashioned tin sink. A dish cupboard stood to one side, and inside the wire-covered upper shelves were more dishes and glasses. Another door opened to the side...a pantry, he hoped.
There were empty bags on the floor, covered with dust and issuing a moldy smell that told him potatoes and onions had rotted away there. There were also shelves along the walls, and on them were jars. One entire wall was filled with full ones, though the contents of some were covered with mold.
He picked through them, peering closely in the light of the candle. Pickles. Still green—all that vinegar should have kept them in good shape. Another jar held something dark red, without mold. Beets. More vinegar—safe too. Peaches, warmly golden under the dusty glass. Fig preserves, dark but always good.
He felt his knees wobble. This was no balanced meal, but it would have to do. He had lost too much blood, and he needed some kind of food to keep him going. After tomorrow, he would have forty thousand reasons to eat well and sleep in comfort.
He opened the jars in the kitchen. Peaches first—the juice was sweet, and he could feel the juice building energy. Figs. A pickle or two. He found himself swaying dizzily before he was done.
But he explored a bit more, though he found himself inexplicably unwilling to cross the dog-run into the other half of the house. Even if there were beds there, he didn’t want to sleep in one. Now that he had something inside him, he found that he had a chilly feeling when he wondered what had happened here.
He looked about at the walls, whose plain boards were covered with tatters of newspaper. The sink was corroded, filthy with dust and mouse-dirt. There were smears of something dark on the floor, under the litter. Something brown and thick had spilled there, long ago.
He pushed aside the bits of newspaper and accumulated trash and stared down. There was a big blotch, and beside it was a chalk-mark, shaped like a body lying on its side, arms extended, legs drawn up. He found himself shaking again. The candle fluttered as he turned to leave the kitchen. He would burn furniture in the front room, make a fire in the fireplace. He wanted lots of light!
He found himself weaker than he thought, and it was with some difficulty that he broke up a couple of chairs and set them alight, using newspaper stripped from the walls. But he was done at last, and when the fire was going merrily, heating the room entirely too much, he settled onto the couch in front and ran his fingers through his money.
Something chittered overhead—he jerked nervously before he told himself that it was a bat in the attic. There were mice all over, according to the droppings, and who knew what else, here in the woods. He must not let himself become nervous. He had to keep from getting weak, though his head kept trying to float away into another dimension.
He fell asleep on the sofa, as the fire burned itself out. Night filled the rooms, as it had done without interruption for a decade. The house endured everything, even this new encroachment that had come to haunt it with problems other than its own. When Harper woke, he was covered with cold sweat. He felt as if a cold mist surrounded him, touching his fevered skin, weighing on his chest. He stared into the darkness, straining to see, but the candle had burnt out and the fire was dead.
Some sense he hadn’t known he possessed was hearing noises from the kitchen. A crashing, followed by a shriek, mouse-thin but audible to his interior ear. A struggle, moving through the house, across the dog-run into the bedrooms, back into the parlor where he lay, stiff with terror. Blows were struck by nothing, hitting nothing, yet they could be heard by anyone there to listen.
Harper tried to roll off the couch, as the terrible conflict came near. But he had been bleeding for hours, and he was too weak to move. He could do nothing, as the sounds filled his mind. He clenched his fists, closing his eyes and moaning. This was delirium. It had to be. He was seriously hurt—or it might be something in the canned stuff he had eaten. He was hallucinating, and daylight had to see the end of it.
Something touched his cheek, moth-soft. Chilly. There was another blow, crashing into his mind as devastatingly as the slug had crashed into his body, and he knew nothing more.
* * * * * * *
The sun rose calmly, sending streaks of light through chinks and splits, making dust-motes dance in the room, as they had done for years. The house was still, as usual, resisting with all the strength of heart-pine the encroachments of termites and ants and dry-rot.
Inside, the ants, with their excellent intelligence work, had found the body and were marching solemnly into and out of the wounds, checking out the ears and the nostrils, making a long safari up the tongue. A beetle was sitting on a glazed eyeball, taking some sort of esoteric delight in its position.
The dust was settling over the chalk-marked kitchen floor, covering up old bloodstains and new man-tracks. The vines in the drive had already sprung up to hide any trace of someone’s passing.
The searchers’ cars passed and repassed the old driveway, as the lawmen cast about for traces of their prey, but nobody looked into that long-empty house.
Not even a bank-robber would be foolish enough to go there, they knew.