Unbury Carol(29)

“Well,” Lucas said, shrugging, “I suppose she’s got to be somewhere.”

Bill refilled their glasses and Clyde felt relief. Not many men in Harrows had been as close to death as Lucas and Hank. Farrah, he believed, was grieving. Nothing more.

Natural.

“You fellas know my wife, Farrah?” he asked.

They did.

“She works for Mister and Missus Evers,” Clyde went on, blabbering now. “She’s taking her lady’s death very hard. She saw her, she did. Last night. In the cellar.”

Then Clyde downed most of his drink. He thought of the wake Farrah had missed.

“If you guys see her, make her feel better. Say something nice. She’s taking her lady’s death very hard.”

He set the glass on the bar and Bill refilled it. Clyde sipped, feeling some relief for having verified, really, that there was nothing odd about what Mister Evers was doing. But he had no way of knowing that his loose lips, wet still with whiskey, had allowed powerful words to escape, words that would travel, mostly innocently, all the way to Sheriff Opal, who would consider it very odd indeed that someone with as many bedrooms as Dwight Evers would keep his dead bride in a cold, drafty storm room in a cellar.





Moxie was stepping toward a saloon when he saw the ghost of Molly.

It was a small town, Baker, and he’d hooked the mare’s reins to a hitching post by a trough, twenty paces from the boardwalk. People walked the planks of Nero Street in summer dresses and dusty vests, and among them Moxie saw her looking at him from behind a glass door as it was opened, but she was gone by the time the door swung back to.

The name Molly crossed his mind, and it was a dark strange feeling because the only Molly he knew who looked anything like that did so some twenty years ago. The look of her wouldn’t have bothered him as much had she not been gesturing. Yes, when Moxie saw her, the girl behind the glass was beckoning him, asking him to come to her, just as Molly had in a tavern two decades past. A band was playing then, and she was asking him to come meet her friend Carol.

Moxie knew he had Carol on the mind. He was nearly strangled with memories of her on the Trail. The mare had done the walking while Moxie swam with Carol in the mossy lake down the hill from the courthouse, stood in the grassy backyard and tossed bugle nuts up at Carol’s window, and waited with her in a crowd of sweaty folk eager to see a boxing match. Yes, he’d been drunk, sober, asleep, upset, in love, and ashamed on this ride, reliving the entirety of his and Carol’s youthful tryst. Mistaking a young girl for Molly was understandable, even likely.

But Moxie didn’t like the gesture. The gesture was too real.

The lithe girl had bent forward, eyes wide, beckoning…waving him this way…this way…

You’ve gotta meet my friend Carol…Carol…come on…

Moxie stepped onto the boardwalk and passed the tavern, trembling inside, twisted with guilt. Ah, that face, the face of Molly, the girl who connected him to Carol in the first place, as if she’d lit a flame that hadn’t flickered in two-decades-plus but hadn’t gone out all the same. Coming to the glass door in which he’d seen the apparition, Moxie found it belonged to a barbershop. She was not on the other side of the glass; not even a girl who looked like her. None that he could see. Mostly, the glass reflected the street behind him: the storefronts across the way, a haberdashery with a painted blue sign, horses carting barrows of feed and produce, the people of Baker on their way.

Moxie entered the barbershop. A bell chimed above him.

“You can take a seat if you’re expecting a shave.”

Two men were seated, bibs across their chests. Two bald men shaved them. And beyond the quartet, in a chair against the back wall, a body under a white slipcover reclined, its head cocked back, its face draped in towels.

“Sir?”

Moxie turned to the closer barber doing the shaving.

“A younger girl,” Moxie said. “About twenty. Dark hair. Bright-green eyes. Was she just in here?”

The barbers shook their heads.

“You lost one?” the heavier one asked.

“Thought I recognized a face.”

The thinner barber pointed at him with his razor. “But you could use a shave as well, if I may be so bold.”

Moxie passed them both, heading to the sink in back. The reclining man covered in towels was still as he approached.

“How about you?” Moxie asked him. “You see a young girl come through here? Dark hair? Green eyes?”

Something shifted beneath the slip. As if the man’s chin had moved on its own without the rest of his face.

“How young, would you say?”

And the voice was a snake’s belly upon wet leaves. Moxie gripped his gun.

“Young enough.”

“Young enough, you say? Young enough to live without fear, you’d say?”

Moxie looked to the barbers. They were busy with their shaves. Neither seemed to hear.

“I don’t have time to banter,” Moxie said, trying to remain calm. But the voice…familiar…

“Young enough to crawl through the swamps if she lost her favorite bow, you’d say?”

Moxie fingered the gun at his hip. “What do you know about her?”

“Young enough to believe life is a gift, you’d say?”