Unbury Carol(94)
Opal tipped his hat and turned the horse.
Manders climbed the steps and entered the house.
The sheriff rode under the cemetery arch and stopped the horse a few feet before the vandalism. Young sunlight against his back cast his shadow across the hole in the earth. He dismounted and studied the circles for a long time. He didn’t like it at all. None of it. Didn’t like the way it made him feel. The images of Farrah Darrow with the unopened whiskey, Dwight Evers in the shadows of the willow trees on the Trail, and Alexander Wolfe in the station were all superimposed ghostlike over the fresh black rectangle in the grass. He hoped to hell’s heaven a traveler had done this. A passer-through. It wasn’t the first time someone had vandalized Harrows’s one graveyard, but it was perhaps the most significant.
Opal didn’t like the circles. Didn’t like that they framed Carol Evers’s grave.
On his horse again, Opal headed for the graveyard arch. He would go to Cole’s house. He’d ask the deputy if anybody, strange or otherwise, had ridden into town last night.
He heard a shuffling in the trees.
Opal stopped the horse and squinted into the shadows. Whoever it was, he was doing a poor job of hiding himself.
Opal drew his gun and fired it into the foliage left of the figure. He heard a shriek.
“Come on out, then,” Opal said.
Without much hesitation a small, soot-covered man emerged from the shadows. Opal gestured come here with his gun.
“I’m not the bad man,” Rinaldo said, raising his arms, as if to show the sheriff there was nothing up his sleeve. “I fooled the bad man twice.”
“Didya now. Why don’t you come a few feet closer and tell me the story.”
Rinaldo did as he was told. Opal noted the genuine smile on the suspect’s face.
“I fooled him once with the outhouse, and again as a double. Have you read Doberman’s book on doubles? I have.”
“Uh-huh.” Opal removed the cuffs from his belt loop.
“Liliana tells me I’m not good at magic. And maybe she’s right. But today…today I was.”
“Magic, huh. What’s a double?” Opal gestured for Rinaldo to come closer yet.
“It’s how you make a man disappear, then reappear somewhere else. Unless you know real magic, you use a double.”
“I see. And so who did you double for?”
Rinaldo was beside the sheriff’s horse now. “The great James Moxie.”
Opal held the suspect’s eyes for the duration of five breaths. “You helped James Moxie disappear, huh?”
“Yes!”
“And then reappear, too.”
“Yes!”
“Uh-huh. And where did he disappear from and where did he reappear to?”
Rinaldo looked over his shoulder, to the rooftops of Harrows.
Opal looked to town, too. Then back at Rinaldo. “James Moxie is here? In Harrows?”
“That’s right. And I helped him.”
“Uh-huh. Well while we’re on the subject of magic…how good are you at getting out of handcuffs?”…
* * *
—
…Farrah woke beside Clyde and quietly slipped out of bed. Despite the fright she’d had under the bed, the fact that Mister Evers had been inside their home, she did not think to wake her husband.
Just then she needed to grieve alone. Carol’s burial was at hand.
As she quietly dressed in the hall, she found herself hoping Sheriff Opal had found something wrong with Mister Evers. It was a terrible thing to long for. She decided she’d visit the sheriff after paying her respects. She’d tell Opal of the shoes she saw while under the bed, and the voice she knew very well, the one that whispered her name.
And if Opal wanted to dig Carol back up at that point? So be it.
As she pulled on her boots, she considered moving somewhere like Griggsville: a town where the people were young, the work was plenty, and she could grow up without the ghost of Carol’s body asleep in every cellar she entered. Clyde’s insistence that Time was grief’s only cure sounded like pig-shit to her last night and horse-shit this morning. Griggsville…distance…these words felt like an all-new kind of truth. Words she could live by.
Standing before the mirror, she saw she did not look well. The pain of losing Carol was evident in every feature. She looked at her lips and imagined them talking to Opal yesterday. She’d visit him again today. Right after she paid her respects. And after seeing the sheriff, she’d ask Clyde if he wanted to move to Griggsville. She was a woman who cherished good feelings, and for her there were none of those left in Harrows.
Dressed and washed, she looked into the bedroom again and saw Clyde in the same position she’d left him. She silently thanked him for trying and left quietly out the front door…
* * *
—
…Dwight left Carol’s body in the coach all night for two reasons:
First, he hoped the cold air might further the appearance of death. Second, the phantom (the friend?) that woke him yesterday morning was right when it told him to hide the body.
Waking up on the gravel drive, the morning of Carol’s burial finally upon him, he checked the coach, found Carol still at rest, and thought of Alexander Wolfe. The fictitious doctor had somehow visited Sheriff Opal last night. Dwight tried not to let this impossibility crack him, but it was hard work. It was one thing to want so badly for everything to go right, but there was certainly a “right” way of things going right.