Strange Country Page 8

  “Maybe if there was a way to see him again, there’d be a way to see Lily too.”

  Hallie thought the obvious way would be to kill herself, but since she didn’t actually want Beth to kill herself and she wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t do it if Hallie suggested it, she didn’t say it.

  “The first thing I thought of,” Beth said, “was killing myself. But I didn’t think that was fair either, that I’d have to kill myself to see my father. Plus, it might not work or I might not go to the under, just pass right through because you don’t go to the under, I guess, unless you have unfinished business. I decided if it could be done, going into the under while I was still alive, I would find out how to do it. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t tell me. Or Boyd. But someone else had to know.”

  “So you left? And didn’t say anything? Boyd’s been looking for you.”

  “When Pabby and that reaper left,” Beth said, “they said things were falling apart. And I guess they were. The reaper said that people were falling through, that things were falling out. I didn’t really know what she meant. But after my father, after he disappeared, there was, I don’t even know how to describe it, something like a shadow that passed over everything—like an eclipse, except it wasn’t an eclipse. It moved across the landscape. You could see it move. And when it passed, I could feel it, like something pushed at me, deep in my chest. It was weird, like everything was different afterwards even though nothing looked different. I heard someone yelling behind the barn. When I looked, I found two women and they were freaked out because they didn’t know where they were or why they were there. I think they thought I kidnapped them.

  “They finally calmed down and called someone who came to pick them up. By then it had probably been two hours since the weird shadow passed. I knew Pabby wouldn’t be back. I don’t know why, really, but I knew she was gone. And I didn’t know what had happened to you or to Boyd. I figured I was on my own, so I got a ride with them. And I just kept going.”

  Hallie could hear a noise, like a low hum or maybe a vibration. In fact, she wasn’t sure it was a noise at all; maybe it was something she could feel in her bones. Beth had crossed back to the table, though she hadn’t sat down again. Hallie went to the window and looked outside, but she didn’t see anything except acres of grass and the old windmill. Not even Maker.

  “There had to be a way to find him again,” Beth continued. “To find Death. And I was determined. Anything outside of that goal—well, I didn’t care anymore. I found a fortune-teller. I found twenty fortune-tellers, and all of them were fake—he was right, it was pretty easy to tell. I went online, into libraries.

  “Nothing.”

  And all this time, you could have called, Hallie thought but didn’t say, because it was clear that it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone might be worried.

  “Then one day, I walked into this shop—you know the kind of place where they sell tarot cards and scented candles and crystals. I’d been in dozens of shops just like it, but I knew the minute I walked through the door that this one was different, that there was something real there.”

  Hallie came back and sat at the table too. Of course there had to be other magic in the world. Other places where things happened. She’d started to see ghosts in Afghanistan. But it hadn’t, somehow, occurred to her in any concrete way that there were people out there somewhere who could see the future like Laddie or had dreams like Boyd or who could wield magic without killing someone for the power it gave.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I didn’t even know,” Beth said. “The person who owned the store came out from the back and it wasn’t them, because it feels different, people who can see things or have some kind of ability and regular people, you know?”

  Hallie didn’t know, but she nodded anyway.

  “I told him I was looking for something and I’d know it when I saw it. He basically showed me everything in the store and it wasn’t there, there was nothing. I could see he thought I’d lost my mind and he was getting exasperated besides. I mean, who could blame him? Then—” She stopped, got up from the table again, and refilled her coffee mug. She took a sip, grimaced, and said, “This old lady came out of the back, and I knew right then.”

  “She was magic?” Which felt weird even to say. But what was a better word? Did she see ghosts? Did she have dreams? Was she doing spells in the back for happiness and luck?

  Beth shook her head. “I don’t know. Is that the right word? Magic? Am I magic? Are you? It’s all different with different people. I can just tell when people see things or know things not what they see or what they know.

  “Anyway, she looked at me for a long time like she could see it too. The man said, ‘She doesn’t know what she wants,’ to the old lady. ‘Yes, she does,’ the lady said. Then she walked over and pulled something out of her pocket and put it in my hand.”

  Beth, who had dropped her messenger bag but hadn’t taken off her jacket when she came inside, pulled something out of her pocket and put it on the table. It was a stone.

  Hallie had seen Laddie’s stone, the stone that let him talk to the dead, once. This one was bigger, though just as smooth and more oblong, whereas Laddie’s was round. It was black like onyx and glistened as if it were wet in the light from overhead.

  “So, what,” Hallie said carefully. “You can talk to the dead now?”

  “What? No?” Beth said it as if the suggestion were idiotic. “No. It’s a key. Or, I guess, a map. Because as soon as I touched it, I knew.” She stopped and looked at Hallie as if it should all be crystal clear.

  It wasn’t. “Knew what?”

  “Where the entrances are,” Beth said. “All of them.”

  “Entrances to what?”

  “There are doors into the under,” Beth said. “I want you to open one of them for me.”

  10

  “No. Jesus, no.”

  Hallie and Boyd and everyone else had worked too hard, sacrificed too much to open up the under again.

  “You have to open it,” Beth said. “I have to go through.”

  “Why?”

  Beth stared at her as if she thought the answer were obvious. “Because I’m going to take his place.”

  There was one brief moment when Hallie felt a wave of relief. One less thing, one less burden dying and coming back had demanded of her. No more visits from Death, no more wondering when the hammer was going to drop. She could just live. Well, with ghosts and Maker and the occasional weird occurrence demanding her attention. But at least without demands from the afterlife. But no. This wasn’t the answer. She couldn’t claim a solution for herself at the expense of a nineteen-year-old who’d lost her entire family.

  “You have no idea what it means,” she told Beth.

  “I think I do.” Beth tilted her chin, as though defiance were the same as strength.

  “You really don’t,” Hallie said. “It means death all the time. Dead people. The dying. It will mean you’re all alone, that you can’t come back here. Ever. It will mean you’re dead.”

  “I think I can come back,” Beth said, persisting. “I think Death used to come back. I think he forgot how.”

  Which Hallie admitted was a possibility, because he’d come to Beth’s mother. In dreams, Beth had said, but there’d obviously been something physical or there wouldn’t be Beth.

  “Why?” Hallie asked.

  “I want—” Beth stopped, thought for a moment. “I want to belong somewhere, for who I am to mean something.”

  “Beth—” Hallie stopped too, had to think about what she was going to say next. “You can make a home here if you want. In Taylor County, I mean. There’s Boyd. And I would help you. Or finish college and then decide. But you don’t want to be Death. You’d be alone forever.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’d make sure I wasn’t.”

  Less than five years separated Hallie and Beth, but it felt like a lifetime, like an abyss that couldn’t be crossed.

  “Yo
u think I don’t understand about death,” Beth said. “Not Death, my father, but dying. You think I have no idea.”

  “You don’t have any idea,” Hallie said.

  “I watched my mother die. And Odie. I lived through my sister dying when I was twelve. People die, I get that.”

  “You, personally, have never been in danger of dying.”

  “I’m not afraid of it.”

  “Then you’re an idiot,” Hallie said.

  Beth looked at her like she knew something Hallie didn’t know, which pissed Hallie off. “Look, I’m not helping you,” she said. “It’s stupid and dangerous.”

  “Fine, I’ll ask Boyd,” Beth said. She bent to retrieve her messenger bag. “I just thought maybe…”

  When she straightened, Hallie was standing between her and the door. “Don’t,” Hallie said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Don’t ever do that. Play me against him. Ever. Besides, he wouldn’t do it.”

  Beth’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah.” She sounded tired. “I know. Or I would have asked him first. I figured you were more likely. Because it would help you out, you know? If I went instead. I thought it was worth a try.”

  Hallie leaned back against the door, resisting the urge just to throw Beth out and be done with it. “What makes you think either one of us could? Open a door to the under? What makes you think you can’t just walk right in on your own? You’re Death’s daughter. If they’re going to let anyone in, it’s going to be you. Have you tried?”

  Beth sank back down into the battered kitchen chair. “No,” she said. “Because…” Her voice dropped, and Hallie couldn’t hear the rest.

  “What?”

  “Because I don’t know exactly where it is!”

  Hallie heard the sound of a car coming up the driveway. Jesus. It was like she was Grand Central Station today. First, Laddie. Then, Beth. And now? Who knew.

  “Hold that thought,” she said to Beth, grabbed her coat, and went outside.

  She rounded the corner of the house in time to see a blue and tan long-bed pickup with rusted-out rear wheel wells pulling up behind Beth’s big old Buick.

  Who the hell was this?

  The temperature had dropped since she and Beth went into the house; the sky was still overcast, but it didn’t feel like snow—they’d had plenty of snow in January and February, and Hallie hoped they were done with it, but she was pretty sure they weren’t. Everything looked colder than it would have if there were snow on the ground—gray and hard and frozen.

  Brett Fowker got out of the truck.

  She was wearing her ever-present cowboy hat, though she’d exchanged the off-white felt one she wore for dress for a dark brown low-crowned model. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail and it swung slightly from side to side as she walked. She had on a flannel-lined denim jacket, leather gloves, and a red scarf. Hallie’d known Brett just about forever. “Just on my way back from the city,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Is this your truck?” Hallie asked. It was obvious it was, because who else would it belong to?

  “Daddy’s gone back down to Arizona for another few weeks,” Brett said, looking at the truck like she barely recognized it herself. “Until the weather really gets good, I guess. He took the little pickup to trailer a couple of horses down, and you know what happened to the other one. I needed something to haul feed. It was cheap.”

  The “little pickup” was a three-quarter-ton Dodge with a special power train package and towing hardware. The other pickup, four doors with a dual-rear axle, had been totaled back in November when Brett had plowed it into a Humvee sitting in the middle of a road that had been completely empty a second earlier. It wasn’t as if Brett couldn’t afford something better than the rusty pickup sitting in Hallie’s yard; it was that, for the most part, she didn’t care.

  “Are you busy?” Brett asked, nodding toward Beth’s car. “I can go. I thought I’d stop to see how Boyd was doing. And your dad.”

  Hallie snugged the collar of her jacket up around her ears. “Come on inside,” she said. She couldn’t remember if Brett had ever met Beth or not. She was pretty sure Brett knew Lily had a sister and that neither Hallie nor Boyd had seen her since November.

  “So how is Boyd doing?” Brett asked again as they headed toward the house.

  “Fine, I guess,” Hallie said. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  Brett looked at her sideways. “Yeah, I think he would,” she said.

  “Well, then I guess he doesn’t know.” Which was probably true. “I didn’t see him for more than a couple of minutes. Some state investigators came to talk to him.”

  “That’s good, right?” Brett said. “That the state’s called in?” She turned and walked backwards a couple of steps, turned back, scanning all the open land as she did it. “It’s a weird feeling. A bad feeling. That someone shot her, that they could be anywhere. Could be out there right now. It’s got to be settled. Quick.”

  Hallie didn’t know if there was something wrong with her—though there probably was: dying and coming back, for one thing—that she hadn’t considered the issue, how it would make other people in the county feel, that someone had been shot right on their own front doorstep. Taylor County was the kind of place people considered safe. Not that nothing happened. Martin Weber had happened, for one thing. People had mysteriously disappeared and reappeared just a few months ago. But those things felt different, felt like things that happened outside the regular rules of society. Shooting someone with a high-powered rifle felt like a broad strike at everyone and everything, because it could have been any of them, just going about their everyday business. It still could be.

  She stamped her feet as she entered the kitchen, and behind her Brett did the same. There wasn’t any mud or snow or anything to stamp onto the kitchen mat, but it was almost automatic, something you did when you came in from the cold. Beth wasn’t there, but her bag was slumped against the chair she’d been sitting in. Hallie gestured toward the coffeepot and shrugged off her jacket on her way out of the kitchen.

  She found Beth in the office with half a dozen maps pulled up on her computer and the stone clutched in her hand. She looked up when Hallie came in.

  “Yeah, I’m not exactly sure, okay?” she said defiantly.

  “You’re not exactly sure?” Hallie repeated the words because she figured she hadn’t heard right or Beth hadn’t said them right. “I thought you said you knew where all the entrances were.”

  “I know generally where they are.” She stressed the word “generally” like Hallie should have understood that from the beginning. “But the world’s a big place. Knowing where a door is in relation to the whole world still leaves a big area. There’s one somewhere in Custer National Park?” She said it like it was a question, like Hallie could say whether she was right or not. “Or the Badlands?” She turned back to the maps. “The Badlands is kind of big, isn’t it?”

  “Will you know it when you see it?” Hallie didn’t bother to hide her sarcasm.

  “Yes,” Beth said. “Yes. I mean, I see them all. And some of the surrounding area. I’ll know. I think. It can’t be more than a hundred square mile area. It’s not in Rapid City. And it’s not across the river.” She frowned over the maps.

  Hallie left her and went back to the kitchen. If Beth couldn’t actually find the door, then she, Hallie, didn’t have much to worry about.

  Brett had already started another pot of coffee when Hallie returned. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t ask Hallie whose car was out in the yard or where they were. Questions like that were nosy, and in a place where everyone knew everyone’s business just as a matter of course, it was bad form to ask directly.

  “So, does your dad like Arizona?” Hallie asked. Like a neutral topic would make everything else easier to talk about.

  “I think he has a girlfriend down there,” Brett said.

  Brett’s mother had been from Minneapolis, had met her father at college. She’d married him and come to
South Dakota, stayed ten years on the ranch, then left and moved back to the city. Brett had visited her at Christmas and spring breaks when she was in school. Hallie had no idea how often Brett saw her now. For several years, her father had had an on-again, off-again relationship with Molly Eckles, who cleaned houses and baked pies to order over in Old Prairie City. Back when Hallie and Brett were in high school, Molly had lived out at the ranch half the year and in town the rest. She and Brett’s father had never married, and sometimes Hallie hadn’t even been sure they’d liked each other. Two years ago, Molly had packed up and moved to North Carolina.

  “Is he coming back?” Hallie asked.

  “I don’t even ask,” Brett said. There was a pause. Hallie stretched her legs in front of her and crossed them, one over the other at the ankle. “Prue Stalking Horse,” Brett said abruptly. “Jesus.”

  “I know,” Hallie said. What else was there to say?

  Brett took a cautious sip of coffee and said, “I’m on call a couple of nights a week right now. I usually stay at the fire station in West PC, though, honestly, unless the call is actually from someone in West PC, it’s going to take upwards of a half hour or more to get there anyway. But I guess that’s not the point,” she added, like she was arguing with herself. “It was…” She tapped her index finger against the side of the mug. “They don’t call us out if someone’s already dead, you know. Sometimes they die before we get there. And a lot of times you can’t tell from the call. I’ve seen car accidents where the car rolled over three or four times before it stopped. I’ve seen someone who had their arm ripped off by a power takeoff.

  “So it’s not like I’m a voyeur or anything. And it’s not like this is the first time someone I know has died. But this—” She swallowed. “This was different.”

  Hallie nodded. It was the way Prue had been killed, with a bullet from a high-powered rifle. In Afghanistan, Hallie’s squad and two others had been pinned down nearly the whole of one day by snipers on rooftops. Andy Rodriguez, whose squad was teamed with hers on almost every task they’d been assigned for two months, and a second soldier, who arrived less than three days earlier and whom she hadn’t known at all, were been shot and killed that day. Hallie didn’t know if that was what Brett meant. She might have only meant that it was violent. But it was more than that, Hallie knew, that kind of death. It was sudden, it was nearly silent, and it was completely faceless. It could happen again, any second. It could happen to you. And there was nothing you could do.