“George?” he called. “George, are you in here?”
He felt and heard crunching underfoot. One of the bags of feed had been torn open. As he knelt to look, he heard a high-pitched clicking above his head. He lurched back, swinging the barrel of the rifle upward.
It was a raccoon. The animal was sitting on top of the pile. It lifted onto its hind legs, rubbing its two front paws together, and gave him a look of absolute innocence. That mess on the floor? Nothing to do with me, pal.
“Go on, beat it.” Caleb poked the barrel of the rifle forward. “Get your ass out of here before I make you into a hat.”
The raccoon scampered down the pile and out the door. Caleb took a breath to calm his heart and passed through the beaded curtain into the store. The lockbox where George kept the day’s receipts sat beneath the counter in its usual spot. He moved through the aisles, finding nothing amiss. A flight of stairs behind the counter led to the second floor—presumably, George’s living quarters.
“George, if you’re there, it’s Caleb Jaxon. I’m coming up.”
He found himself in a single large room with upholstered furniture and curtains on the windows. The homeyness of it surprised him—he had expected a scene of bachelor squalor. But George had been married once. The room was divided into two areas, one for living, the other for sleeping. A kitchen table; a couch and chairs with lace doilies on the headrests; a cast-iron bed with a sagging mattress; an ornately carved wardrobe of a type that usually stayed within a family, traveling the road of several generations. All seemed orderly enough, but as Caleb surveyed the space, he began to notice certain things. A dining chair had been knocked over; books and other objects—a kitchen pot, a ball of yarn, a lantern—were tossed about the floor; a large, free-standing mirror had shattered in its frame, the glass cracked in concentric circles, like a reflective spider’s web.
As he moved toward the bed, the odor hit him: the rancid, biological reek of old vomitus. George’s chamber pot sat on the floor near the headboard; that was where the smell was coming from. Blankets were bunched at the foot of the mattress as if kicked aside by a restless sleeper. On the bedside table lay George’s gun, a long-barreled .357 revolver. Caleb opened the cylinder and pushed the ejection rod. Six cartridges fell into his palm; one had been fired. He turned around and swept the pistol over the room, then lowered the gun and stepped toward the fractured mirror. At the epicenter of the cracks was a single bullet hole.
Something had happened here. George had obviously been ill, but there was more to it. A robbery? But the lockbox hadn’t been touched. And the bullet hole was strange. A stray shot, perhaps, though something about it seemed deliberate—as if, lying in bed, George had shot his own reflection.
In the alley, he filled his jugs from the tank and loaded them onto the buckboard. It wouldn’t do to leave without paying; he made his best guess and left the bills under the counter with a note: “Nobody here, door unlocked. Took fifteen gallons of kerosene. If the money isn’t enough, I’ll be back in a week and can pay you then. Sincerely, Caleb Jaxon.”
On the way out of town, he stopped at the town office to report what he’d found. At least someone should fix the door of the mercantile and lock the place up until they knew what had happened to George. But nobody was there, either.
Dusk was settling down when he returned to the house. He unloaded the kerosene, put the horses in the paddock, and entered the house. Pim was sitting with Kate by the cold woodstove, writing in her journal.
Did you get it what you needed?
He nodded. Strange how Kate was now the silent one. The woman had barely glanced up from her knitting.
How was town?
Caleb hesitated, then signed: Very quiet.
They ate corn cakes for supper, played a few hands of go-to, and went to bed. Pim was out like a light, but Caleb slept badly; he barely slept at all. All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As dawn approached, he gave up trying and crept from the house. The ground was moist with dew, the last stars receding into a slowly paling sky. Birds were singing everywhere, but this wouldn’t last; to the south, where the weather came from, a wall of flickering clouds roiled at the horizon. So: a spring storm. Caleb guessed he had maybe twenty minutes before it arrived. He gave himself another minute to watch it, then retrieved the first jug of kerosene from the shed and lugged it to the edge of the woods.
He didn’t know what he was seeing. It simply made no sense. Perhaps it was the light. But no.
The mounds were gone.
40