“Farmers are proud people,” Ben said. He thought of his encounter with Hank Seward yesterday.
“That’s what I thought at first,” Cal said. “So, of course, I redoubled my efforts. Christmas was coming up, celebrated around the world as the season when one can most easily get away with being a meddlesome priest. We had a great boys’ choir back then, so I set up a free concert in the church in the valley.”
“And no one showed up?”
“The concert never happened. By seven-thirty a handful of villagers had assembled, children mostly. They were thin as ghosts and half as haunted. Then, a few minutes before showtime, a man ran in to the church, wild with either horror or excitement. The Crofts was on fire. Of course, we all ran outside. The night was windless but unbearably cold. Between the mountains, there was a cloud of smoke hovering above the Crofts, tinted orange by the light of the fire below. I later heard people remark that they saw a pillar of flame billowing toward the sky”—the priest waved his hand above his head—“as if it were something from the Old Testament.”
“Anyone get hurt?”
Cal cleared his throat. “Two of the Swann boys died in the fire.”
“I thought the two sisters were childless,” Ben said.
“The boys were their nephews. Their parents had died in a car accident years earlier, and the sisters cared for them. One of the boys was in his teens, and I believe the other was even younger.”
“Terrible,” Ben said. The night he’d spent thinking that Charlie had been taken from him was the worst of his life.
“The sisters had taken in foster children, and it was one of them who’d set the fire. A firebug from day one, apparently. There was an investigation, a trial, and the boy was taken away.”
“Taken where?”
“Juvenile detention or some such place, I assume. Suffice it to say, this fire further piqued my curiosity about the town. I saw the looks on the faces of the villagers when it happened, and it just didn’t feel quite right. I tried to find out more about the town and the Crofts. It had gotten under my skin, too—the way it sits between the mountains like a medieval castle. But small-town folk know how to keep to themselves. Their ranks grew even tighter after the fire. Even the county road closed for a few days. They said something about bad ice conditions, but the roads everywhere else were fine. Once it reopened, I tried to reschedule the concert, but they shut me out.” The priest shook his head and looked at Ben.
“Is that all?” Ben asked.
“I assure you that, in my line of work, I don’t encounter that behavior in people often, to say nothing of experiencing it uniformly across an entire community.”
Ben nodded but felt dissatisfied. The priest’s story was all dénouement. He raised his nose to the air. The stink from the forest had become too strong to ignore.
“That smell is really something,” the priest said. What had begun as an unpleasant scent carried on the breeze was now a thick, oppressive stench.
“Might be stagnant water,” Ben said, but he knew what it really was. On the opposite side of his property, the same smell had come from the hole where he’d buried the remains of the mutilated deer. He peered into the dark wood as sweat pricked across his arms and forehead. His body wanted him to run for clean air, but Ben forded deeper into the smell.
“Probably,” Cal said. He didn’t sound any more convinced than Ben did.
Ben bent back a thatch of undergrowth and stepped under the forest’s canopy. The sunlight-starved ground under the trees was soft with the last year’s pine needles. “You don’t have to come with me,” Ben told the priest. He pulled up the collar of his shirt to cover his nose.
But the priest fell into step behind him, and Ben was glad for the company. They walked deeper into the terrible smell. Hudson would have known which way to go, but the stink had overwhelmed Ben’s olfactory senses. Every direction seemed equally unbearable, and he began to breathe from his mouth.
His eyes and ears helped where his nose couldn’t. The humming clouds of insects ahead blurred the air with their vast numbers.
The trench of a ravine or seasonal stream was ahead, and they climbed over the sprawling root system of a huge oak tree situated on its lip. It hadn’t felt as if they’d walked far, but they were right up against the foot of the mountain.
The incredible number of flies made it difficult for Ben to understand what he was seeing. There were bones in the ravine. Dead animals, Ben guessed from the varying sizes of the remains. Stark white rib cages arced from the ground, some still draped with graying sinew.
Ben picked up a rock and pitched it into the ravine. Upon contact, there was a wet sound that made his stomach lurch. The insects momentarily relinquished their stake and diffused into the air in a pulse of movement. This sent the trees above him trembling, and Ben looked up to see the branches lined with hundreds of crows, silently watching him with their empty eyes.
“Looks like deer, mostly,” Cal said.
Ben counted at least five large and separate rib cages. The ground beneath them writhed with maggots. Some of the bones were clean, others coated with torn flesh and gristle. It was a pit fresh from a Brueghelian hell.
“Maybe they fell into the ravine, broke their legs, and couldn’t get out,” Ben said. His voice was muffled from the sleeve he’d pressed over his face. The drop into the ravine was severe, and the bottom was littered with boulders. He could imagine a herd of the animals losing their footing in the dark of night.
“But there are smaller animals, too,” the priest said. He pointed to a pile of rodent-like skulls along the rocky ledge.
Raccoons or opossums, Ben guessed.