Unbury Carol(7)

And yet…still falling.

The hoarse breathing continued.

“Do not wake, dear,” Dwight said. And his voice was without reason. “You have no idea how dark it is, living in someone else’s shadow.”

Carol tried to understand, tried to process, but the singular idea that would not go away was simply too abhorrent to accept: He wants you to stay this way.

“And for a man to go unseen, in the shadow of his wife…Oh, Carol. Do not wake. Do not deny me this triumph.”

Falling.

Falling.

Falling.

Then Carol heard his shoes leaving the storm room, the creaking of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. Footfalls in the hallway, then foyer. The front door opened then closed.

The hooves of the horses came to fiery life in the drive.

Dwight!

The sound of the carriage evaporated into a night Carol could only imagine.

He wants you to stay this way.

But before Carol could ask another question, before she could attempt to make sense of the horrors upon her, the cellar door swung open again.

Through the wind, Carol heard.

Footsteps, again, on the creaking stairs.

Had she gotten it wrong? Was Dwight still here?

Bare feet on the stone floor and the quick shuffling of someone approaching.

A thief, perhaps. One of the many terrible men who stalked the Trail. Someone had been watching the house, waiting for the coach to leave.

As the bare feet reached the storm room, then entered, the many rough faces she’d seen on the Trail became one. It was a mask she’d known twenty years past, features not yet molded by life as an outlaw, and a name not yet legendary to those who heard it.

James Moxie.

For the duration of one slowed beating of her heart, she imagined Moxie entering the storm room and removing her, undoing what Dwight had begun.

Dwight wants you this way.

But could this be true?

“Carol!”

The shrieking sound of Farrah’s voice so close to her ear echoed like a golden eagle’s cracked call in Howltown.

“Carol! You look…you look…”

Farrah began sobbing again. Heavy rain in the coma. And to the beat of Farrah’s falling tears, Carol tried hard to defy the only explanation she could find, the answer to where Dwight must have gone.

Dwight said she was dead.

Dwight drove off in the carriage.

Don’t think it. Please don’t think it.

But it was too late to stop it from coming. And when it arrived, it was whole.

He drove to the funeral home.

HELP!

But nobody could hear a silent plea sung from the storm room of a cellar in Harrows. Not even the girl who lamented beside her.

It’s my worst fear, Hattie once told a nine-year-old Carol, as Mom hammered at wooden boards in the workroom. My daughter buried alive.

But Carol was not buried. She was falling.

Falling.

Falling.

And the voices that accompanied her were the voices of memory, with no volume to tell a funeral home director she was alive, no hand to stop the gravediggers from shoveling, no fingers to lift the lid of a casket that might be coming soon.

Closing soon, too.

Stop it! Carol scolded herself. You’re afraid. That’s all. You heard him wrong.

But she’d never misheard anything in Howltown. The opposite, in fact. For as long as Carol could remember, the things she’d heard as she fell were beyond even the truth of the words themselves. There was the truth of the person behind them.

What had Dwight begun?

“Oh, Carol!” Farrah suddenly cried, and her voice was a banshee shriek. “You look alive!”





Dwight steered the gray steeds through downtown Harrows, passing Sheriff Opal’s station halfway to the southern border. Nobody was out. The death of Carol’s homosexual friend John Bowie had sent a shiver through town that Dwight could still feel clinging to the cool early-evening air. It bothered him.

Bowie was never a threat, not exactly. Because Bowie wasn’t interested in women, Dwight felt just fine with all the time he and his wife had spent out on the porch, in the parlor, taking walks…talking. There was no stopping the inevitable suggestion Carol made that they inform John Bowie of Carol’s condition, and there was nothing Dwight could think of to refute it.

It was a very delicate business, planning a murder, and one had to be very careful with what one showed. And what one didn’t.

Bowie’s death was also inevitable, Dwight thought. Of course there was no predicting whom the Illness would suddenly take, and yet the way Bowie lived—the drinking and cavorting, the endless flirting and conversing, the idea that his mind and worldview might bring him to transcend the rituals most people had to endure—that was the end of John Bowie, and Dwight had spotted it the day he met him.

Perhaps John was a threat after all. A philosophical threat. A spiritual adversary. Someone more fun than Dwight.

But Dwight refused to admit it.

“To Lafayette’s!” Dwight called, snapping the reins, guiding the gray horses past downtown Harrows to the wide-open wheat fields that always looked like ice drifts under the darkening sky. Lafayette lived here, in the border of dark willows that signified the start of the Trail.

Dwight thought and rehearsed. Rehearsed and thought.

He imagined himself standing before the funeral director Robert Manders.