Strange Country Read online

  Despite the frozen ground, there were clear signs that heavy foot traffic had tramped across the yard, grass matted down hard, the frozen earth underneath showing through. Yellow tape crossed the porch entrance, the door open and fastened with an orange-striped bungee cord so it didn’t bang against the side of the house in the wind. The yard itself, seen in daylight, was neat but utilitarian, old evergreen shrubs underneath the porch windows, one lone tree on the far side near the house, a narrow sidewalk from the street to the porch door. Maybe there would be tulips and daffodils in the spring, but otherwise there was nothing to soften the stark white edges of the enclosed front porch or the bland old siding. If he’d ever thought much about it, which he hadn’t, Boyd wouldn’t have expected this house for Prue Stalking Horse. He’d have expected modern—glass and steel and blond wood furniture. He’d also have expected her to live in St. Paul, to run a New Age herb shop or a yoga center or a retreat for busy executives who wanted to pretend a weekend of meditation and moderate exercise would give them compassion or calm their overstressed hearts.

  But she hadn’t. She’d lived here, in West Prairie City. And now she’d died here.

  7

  After she left Boyd’s house, Hallie stopped at the grocery store on the edge of West Prairie City, then headed over to Templeton to the ag supply. Pabby’s old Ford tractor, which Hallie thought she’d fixed last week when she replaced the battery, had failed to start again three days ago when she went out to move some of the big round bales closer to the barn. This time the fan belt had snapped in two. Maybe it was old, maybe it was the cold, most probably a combination of the two. The tractor was a 1974 model, and she’d had to order the part in, but Forest Buehl, who’d worked at the ag supply in Templeton since he was fifteen, could find any part for any tractor.

  There was no snow on the ground. Everything looked flat and gray brown and empty, even in West Prairie City, even with cars and trucks slant-parked all along Main, it looked empty. As if the apocalypse had come several weeks ago, and Hallie and the few other people still around had just completely failed to notice.

  She looked for shadows along the road, torn between annoyance that Death hadn’t talked to her in weeks and something that felt an awful lot like relief. She wanted it over with, wanted her chance to say it flat out—no. No, she wasn’t going to be, didn’t want to be, would never be Death. Wanted to stop looking for him in every shadow on every road.

  Maybe he hadn’t been back because he’d changed his mind.

  That thought pissed her off almost as much as his absence, because he’d brought her back. He’d asked the question. And they’d saved him, she and Boyd, saved the under—saved the world, to be clear. The least he could do was show up.

  There were only three trucks in the parking lot when Hallie reached the ag supply. Tiny dry flakes of snow swirled in the air. On the ground, they clustered together, then swept across the parking lot in narrow white lines. A band of clouds sat low on the horizon, not moving closer or farther away, just sitting there, like foreboding.

  The ag supply was so brightly lit in contrast to the gray day outside that Hallie had to stop just inside the doorway for a minute and blink. It was a big space—horse supplies and tack to the left, boots and denim to the right, the parts window clear in back. There were two women on the cash registers, one of them Jenny Vagts, who gave Hallie a half smile before she went back to ringing up three pairs of jeans, two rubber calf feeders, and a blue salt lick for a white-haired rancher in a sheepskin jacket and black hat.

  By the time Hallie had walked the length of the store to the parts window, Forest Buehl had the fan belt sitting on the counter waiting for her.

  “Thanks for getting it in so fast,” she said. Hallie couldn’t help studying Forest every time she saw him. He’d disappeared back in the fall, along with two dozen other people, dropped straight into the under when the walls had gone all thin. All of them, at least the ones Hallie’d talked to, claimed they didn’t remember a thing from the moment they fell through until they were back in the world. Hallie found that hard to believe, that they didn’t remember, figured even without conscious memory, the act itself had to have an effect. They’d gone to the land of the dead and come back. That ought to make a difference. So far, she couldn’t see that it had.

  “You want to pay for that here?” Forest asked her.

  “Sure,” Hallie said. “I don’t need anything else.”

  Forest took the fan belt back from her and turned to the register. “You know we’ve still got slots open for Saturday-night bowling.” He took her debit card and ran it through the slot. “It’s pretty informal, not leagues or nothing. But, you know, if you’re looking for something to do…” He shrugged, like the shrug was actually the punctuation.

  “You know I’m kind of dating someone, right?” she said. More than kind of, actually, but she always said it like that, like it might change at any moment, like she didn’t quite trust that it was a relationship, which she didn’t.

  Rather than looking embarrassed, as she’d expected, he looked at her with a grin and handed her card back to her. “Everybody knows that,” he said. “You know how it is around here—everyone’s business is everyone’s business. But, I guess what I mean is, it’s the same people every Saturday, and I like ’em and all, but you can get tired of the same people and the same topics and things turning out pretty much the same way all the time. Someone comes back who’s around our age and done some different things, I like to ask. Most people don’t come, but most people are just looking to leave town again as soon as they can. Hey, it can’t hurt, right?”

  “I’ll think about it,” Hallie said, and was surprised that she meant it.

  He slid the fan belt into a paper bag with a stamped logo on it. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s all I’m saying.”

  Back out in the truck, Maker was watching two delivery trucks jockey for position at the loading dock on the side of the ag supply, focused on them like their maneuvering was the most interesting thing it had seen in days. Hallie tossed the bag with the fan belt onto the floor of the truck, started the engine, and turned on the heater.

  “Is Death ever coming?” she asked without looking over at Maker.

  “Death always comes,” Maker said.

  “To…” She was surprised it was hard to say, because usually nothing was that hard for her. Think of it and do it, all one thing, because anything else was too slow. “To take me.” She had to bite down to get the word out, and she changed it as soon as she had. “To ask me again.”

  Maker turned to look at her and licked the tip of its nose. “Did you answer?” it asked.

  “He didn’t give me time to answer,” she said.

  “You can answer anytime,” Maker said.

  Hallie put the truck in gear, but she didn’t pull out of her parking spot. “Really?” Because it didn’t seem right. Or likely.

  “Anytime,” Maker repeated. “Anytime he can hear you,” it added. Then it jumped through the window, disappearing before it reached the ground.

  Hallie thought about it all the way home. As usual with Maker the question was, what exactly did it mean? Anytime Death could hear her? Saying it out loud? That didn’t seem likely. In a dream? How would she convince her dream self to do it? Go into the under? She didn’t know how and even if she did, would she? If she could do any of those things, would he just accept her answer? Why had he asked her at all, come to that? Couldn’t he simply make her do it? Grab her and take her to the under and say—hey, it’s all on you now?

  There were too many questions and not enough answers and she still wanted to know what she’d wanted to know for months—what were the real choices, what could she really choose?

  She stopped at her father’s on the way back to Pabby’s—hers, almost hers, but it felt disloyal or ungrateful to think of it that way. Pabby would have told her she was an idiot. If I hadn’t wanted you to have it, I wouldn’t have left it to you, she’d have said.

/>   Of course, whether Hallie thought of it as hers or not, the neighbors would refer to it from now until eternity as the old Pabahar place, even if it had a hundred owners between now and then.

  Her father was out somewhere when Hallie let herself into the house, the storm door ushering her into the familiar scents of old boots and straw and coffee. She went into the back room and pulled three packages of steaks from the freezer, since her father hadn’t remembered to do it. Then she wrote a quick note—Took the steaks, see you at 7—and left.

  It wasn’t noon yet as she pulled back onto the state road, but so overcast that it felt like late afternoon with dusk approaching. A pickup with a dual rear axle and a light bar that looked brand-new passed her, and she could see the lights of another car maybe half a mile back, but otherwise the road was empty. She didn’t pay much attention, couldn’t stop the progression of thoughts—Prue and Death and the note she’d gotten that morning. Laddie too. None of it the same thing, but none of it a problem she could solve the way she liked to solve problems, by running straight at them.

  As soon as she turned into the driveway, she saw it, something fluttering in the breeze like a trapped bird. Same spot—hell, the exact spot—where the note had been that morning. Same fence post—or, at least, another fence post that looked exactly like. She slowed, then stopped, sat with the engine idling and looked at the post, at the surrounding fields, all the way up to the house and the barn. Nothing moved. Nothing except that damned note on its post.

  She left the truck running and got out, carrying the prybar from under the seat.

  It was the same as before: heavy paper, note lashed to the fence post with baling twine. Despite the overcast, she could read this one fine right here.

  FACE YOUR FEAR.

  And then the coordinates. The same set as before—+43° 46' 22.85", −102° 0' 17.38".

  What the hell? No, really, what the hell?

  She hadn’t decided if she was going to take it or if she was going to leave it right there and see what happened, when she heard a car slow on the road and turn up into the drive.

  She grabbed the note off the post, watched the post crumple into dust again, stuffed the note in her jacket pocket, and kept hold of the prybar as she stepped to one side so she could see who was approaching.

  The car, a thirty-year-old gold Buick with a vicious dent in the rear passenger door, stopped behind Hallie’s pickup; the engine turned off, then dieseled for a moment, like it was trying to come back to life on its own. Which wouldn’t surprise Hallie, because it turned out things did come back to life. Hell, she’d come back to life. But this was just a car. Probably. It was probably just a car. Sometimes things actually were just the ordinary things they appeared to be.

  On the other hand, she’d just received a note that had come fastened to a post that no longer existed. And if she’d learned anything from Afghanistan, from Death, from Martin Weber, it was that it paid to be prepared.

  The car door opened. Beth Hannah stepped out.

  Beth Hannah, sister to Boyd’s murdered wife, Lily.

  Beth Hannah, Death’s daughter.

  Who’d been stalked by a reaper and who’d turned to Boyd for protection.

  Hallie hadn’t seen Beth in months, not since the reaper, Travis Hollowell, had come out of the under to find her, to convince her to marry him because marrying her would make him human again. And immortal. Because Beth, and Lily, who’d been married to Boyd before she’d died, were Death’s daughters. Marrying one of them conferred immortality on their spouse—sort of.

  Beth had disappeared after the final confrontation, after Hallie had stopped Travis Hollowell, after Lily and Pabby had rebuilt the wall between the worlds. Boyd looked for her, put out calls to sheriff and police departments all over the country. But he hadn’t found any trace of her. Beth was maybe not precisely the last person Hallie had expected to see coming up her driveway on a dry, cold March afternoon, but she was pretty damned close.

  She was recognizable and yet, she looked different from the last time Hallie had seen her—hair still curly but pulled back into a tight ponytail, black jeans, black T-shirt, hiking boots, and a black hooded Carhartt jacket. She had dark makeup around her eyes so that the irises looked darker and larger. She had a messenger bag slung across her chest and black biker’s gloves on her hands.

  “What are you—? Where have you been?” Hallie asked.

  “I need your help,” she said, just like that, no preamble, not hello or What have you been up to? or even, How did it all turn out, there, at the end?

  8

  They entered Prue Stalking Horse’s house through the side door, which was a relief. Not that Boyd wouldn’t have walked in the front, past the spot where Prue had lain on the hard porch floor and died. He’d have done it. He was a master at pushing things down and moving past. It was what he did.

  Some days, though, pushing things down and moving past was exhausting.

  The kitchen looked almost the same as it had the previous night. The gloomy winter sky outside cast shadows underneath the counters, but Boyd could see that on a sunny day, it would be warm and welcoming.

  They heard heavy footsteps, and a moment later, Ole emerged from the cellar. He nodded at them in greeting and crossed to a short counter near the door where he retrieved a big steel thermos. He poured coffee, still hot enough that Boyd could see steam rising, into a collapsible cup, then offered coffee to each of them in turn by the simple expedient of holding the thermos toward one and then the next in his large hand. He drained his cup in one long swallow, wiped a hand across his mouth, and said, “You better take a look.”

  He gestured for Boyd to go first, like he wanted his impressions of the cellar and whatever was down there without Ole or Agents Cross and Gerson interfering.

  The basement was really a cellar with dirt floors and stone walls, cold and damp even now as winter shifted over into spring. Light came from two naked bulbs, one directly at the bottom of the stairs and another just to the left of a big furnace that must have been at least fifty years old. The two bulbs cast weak yellow light on the dark walls and floor.

  Past the furnace and a small stack of old cardboard boxes darkened by age and probably by the dampness in the cellar was a single work light clamped to a floor joist, the white cord running down the wall and across the cellar to an outlet attached to another floor joist near the stairs. Boyd approached, noting that the floor was uneven beneath his boots.

  A pickax and a shovel were leaned up against the long wall. Someone had dug a shallow pit, maybe a foot deep at most. Inside, clearly though not completely exposed, were the remains of a human skeleton.

  Boyd looked at Ole, who was standing just behind him at the bottom of the stairs, Cross two steps up, and Gerson halfway down.

  “A body?”

  Ole still didn’t say anything, his mouth set in a grim line.

  Boyd stepped forward and crouched by the pit, taking a moment to study the exposed parts of the skeleton carefully—half the skull, the arc of a collarbone, the upper portion of the rib cage, the left ulna, bits of both the right and left hand, and what he took for the right femur. In the dirt just to the left of the lowest exposed rib, but also in the dug-out pit, was a disturbed bit of earth and what looked like chunks of newly mined coal, gray and dark. He almost reached out to brush the dirt from the area, but stopped himself. Instead, he got up, unclipped the work light from the overhead floor joist, squatted back down in a slightly different location for a better view. He tilted the light to shine on the spot he wanted to inspect. Something shone back at him. Three somethings, he realized as the lamplight shifted, spaced like an equilateral triangle. Not clumps of dirt or even coal, but something that reflected light, like glass or gemstones.

  “What—?” Before he could finish the sentence, there was a bright flash of light big enough to fill the cellar and momentarily blind him. As it faded, Boyd heard a rumble of thunder as if from a long way off. He stood, quick enoug
h that he stumbled.

  Ole put a hand under his elbow. “Okay?” he said.

  Boyd blinked against the afterflash. His heart pounded like a roar in his ears. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t even breathing hard and he didn’t think his heart was beating too fast—just loud. It felt as if there was still something there, something unseeable in the cellar with them.

  “What was that?” Boyd asked. No one answered.

  Ole frowned at him, something resembling concern on his face. “What was what?” he asked.

  Cross, intent on the bones, stepped past both of them and crouched in the same spot Boyd had been a few seconds earlier. Gerson had stepped back, against the stone wall, one hand on her chest. She looked at Boyd, looked back at the bones. She drew in a visible breath, reached into her bag, and retrieved a notepad and pen.

  “We need an evidence team,” she said. “I’m sure your people are good.…”

  But they’re not trained for this, Boyd thought. Or, they were trained for bones and bodies and even for small objects buried in dirt. But they weren’t trained for things that appeared to be clumps of dirt but reflected light instead; they weren’t trained for bright flashes of light everyone didn’t see. Neither was he.

  “Already called,” Ole said. “But I wanted to make sure you saw this. What the hell?” he said, to himself mostly, Boyd thought. “What the hell went on here?”

  “They need to pay attention to those stones beside the body,” Boyd said.

  Ole frowned. “What stones?”

  Boyd ducked his head to move past Cross, who looked up at him and then grudgingly rose and stepped around the bones to the darker side of the cellar.

  Boyd crouched again and pointed. “Right there. What are those? At a glance they look like dirt clods, but they’re not and there’s something—” He stopped, not sure what to say about them. Ole had never said anything about any of the things that happened in Taylor County last fall—not about Martin Weber or his blood magic, not about Travis Hollowell, the reaper, who had killed Boyd’s wife and, at the end, almost killed Boyd. He had never said anything about Uku-Weber and the destruction there, at least nothing beyond—yeah, hell of a gas leak. Nothing. About any of it. So what was Boyd going to say now? That he’d seen a flash of light, heard thunder while Ole and, he was pretty sure Cross, had seen and heard nothing?