“Jeremy?”
Rowenna was looking back at him, and even in the dark, he could see the question in her eyes.
“I’m coming,” he said, and caught up with them. Together, they walked the rest of the way around the cemetery and back to the street, where he noted again that the cemetery sat on a rise above the traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian.
Back at the Flynn plantation, they had discovered that the graves of the family burial ground sat above a maze of dank tunnels that led to the river. Waterlogged at times, they were navigable tunnels for all that. Here, the cemetery lay higher above the water, not below sea level, as the graves at the plantation did.
Was there a similar secret passage below the earth here, its entrance hidden beneath a grave marker?
But nothing had been disturbed in the graveyard. The place had been thoroughly searched, and there had been no sign of digging, no indication that the ground had been disturbed in any way.
There were several aboveground tombs and burial vaults here. Maybe one of them opened and offered a gateway to some realm beneath the earth. Tomorrow, he would talk to Brentwood, and no matter what it took, he would find a way to legally tear apart the cemetery, and never mind that it was on the National Register of Historic Places.
Tomorrow.
How many tomorrows did they have before Mary was discovered dead, a macabre scarecrow in a field, half-consumed by crows, a smile slashed in blood across her face?
Rowenna was looking back at him again, and he realized that he was standing still, thinking. He smiled. “I’m coming,” he said again.
Now, however, Brad stopped. He was staring over the wall, and then he turned to Jeremy. “He took her. Somehow, he took her.”
“Who took her, Brad?” Jeremy asked, afraid of the answer. Brad had a look in his eyes that said he was slipping away again.
“The devil,” Brad said firmly.
“Brad, the devil doesn’t slip into cemeteries and kidnap living women.”
“That devil of a man. Damien. He’s the one who took her,” Brad insisted.
“Brad, we’re looking for him. But even if we find him, he may not be guilty of anything other than overacting and telling fortunes without a permit,” Jeremy said patiently.
But Brad shook his head, deadly serious. “He’s the devil in human form, Jeremy, I’m telling you. You don’t understand. I saw it in his crystal ball.”
“Brad,” Jeremy said, “the man, whoever he is, knows some good magic tricks, that’s all. He showed you a picture of a turkey dinner, and your imagination did the rest.”
Brad shook his head in emphatic disagreement.
It disturbed Jeremy to see the way Rowenna was looking at Brad, a worried frown furrowing her brow.
“The picture in the crystal ball changed,” she said softly.
“Rowenna,” he said warningly, and stared at her, adding silently, Please, for the love of God, don’t encourage him. Don’t get sucked into his delusion, don’t encourage him to think the devil has come to earth and stolen his wife.
“The picture changed. I saw cornfields. Rows and rows of corn, and…he was threatening me. I know that the man was threatening me. I saw the cornfields, and I saw something else.”
The street seemed to fall dead silent then. It was as if even the breeze had hushed itself to better hear Brad’s words.
“What did you see?” Jeremy asked flatly at last.
“Evil. I saw pure evil,” Brad said.
Suddenly the air was split by an eerie, keening cry, as if a wolf had let out a loud and plaintive howl.
Except there were no wolves around here. Not anymore. Not for more than a hundred years.
It was a husky, Jeremy told himself. Someone in the area had a dog, and that dog was baying to the moon that even now was rising higher in the night sky.
“You can’t see evil, Brad, it’s a concept,” Jeremy said.
“No. I saw evil,” Brad insisted. “The man was evil, and I saw evil in the shadows, in the darkness, in the corn. It’s a deadly harvest of evil, that’s what it is,” Brad said.
Again, the dog howled.
“Time to get you back to your room, Brad,” Jeremy told him.
“I have to keep looking. I have to find Mary,” Brad said.
“It’s all right,” Rowenna told him. She took his face between her hands and stared into his eyes. “It’s all right, Brad, really. We all know about the danger in the cornfields now. And everyone is looking for Mary. She’s going to be all right.”
“How can you know?” Brad demanded, anguished.
“Because I’ve seen the cornfields in my dreams. I’ve seen the scarecrows. And Mary isn’t one of them,” she said very softly.
She turned away from Brad, lowering her head, but Jeremy saw the movement of her lips.
And he imagined that he heard her one whispered word escape them.
“Yet.”
8