THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft, Page 2

  And then, yes, there had been a final shot, and when, after hearing Mr. Kellog cry aloud, Dana had gathered the courage to come out of the bathroom, she had found him, Mr. Kellog, lying on the motel room’s bed, bleeding profusely. Mrs. Kellog had disappeared. That was when Dana had called the motel’s night manager and told him to phone the police.

  There were many more questions, and objections, both sustained and denied, and then there was the cross-examination. Ms. Tryon tried as hard as she could to convince the jury that Dana was some kind of slut or nymphomaniac, but Dana stuck to her guns. She knew the jury wouldn’t buy her story that she’d stopped at the motel so she could call her baby-sitter, but the truth of the matter was that she hadn’t ever had sex with Carl Kellog. Maybe everyone else in Leech Lake County had, but that Friday the 13th would have been Dana’s first shot—and Janet had got there first.

  And for that she should have been gunned down by the guy’s jealous wife?

  Basically, that was the question the jury had to ask itself, and when they answered it, their answer was no. No, Janet Kellog didn’t have any business shooting anyone, including her husband, who’d taken the last bullet from her handgun in his right shoulder. No, the citizenry of Leech Lake County decided, that was not allowable behavior, even for a wife with a history (most of which was not admitted into evidence) of having been repeatedly wronged, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

  The jury’s verdict got headlines in the Leech Lake Sentinel–Courier, but only three inches in the Minneapolis Star–Tribune, which was the only paper Dana’s family read. So they never found out about the whole miserable mess, which was an unexpected plus.

  Janet, when it came time, late in January, for her sentencing, got sent to Mankato for a year. Dana could have wished it was for life, but the bullet, after all, had hit Carl, so she couldn’t really feel as though there’d been a miscarriage of justice.

  A year was enough.

  3

  “I see a journey,” said Brenda Zweig, touching the Six of Wands and tilting her head back as she narrowed her eyes to slits.

  Even dramatized by the candlelight, Diana Turney’s face did not show any sign of heightened interest, much less excitement. And Diana was no sphinx. Her least desires were as visible to Brenda’s practiced eye as acne. Clearly, a journey was not something Diana cared to see in her cards tonight. “It could be a physical journey or a spiritual journey,” Brenda equivocated. “In either case, it is associated with a gift. Something very rare and precious, but dangerous at the same time. It might be better not to accept it, but I don’t know if that’s possible. Gifts are hard to refuse.”

  Diana could not help but take such bait as this, but even when she asked, “What kind of gift?” Brenda could sense that her anxieties had another, more urgent focus, still undiscovered.

  Brenda leaned forward and tapped the wreath on the horseman’s staff with her fingernail. “A wreath like this indicates some unusual mental or psychic power. Poets are crowned with laurel wreaths. But the card is reversed, so there may be some kind of treachery involved. Gifts are not always blessings. Think of the Trojan horse. And there’s a horse right there on the card.”

  Brenda rarely dwelt on themes of apprehension and distrust when she read the tarot for a regular client, unless the cards left her absolutely no choice, and that had certainly not been the case tonight. Some imp of the perverse had got hold of her tongue. Already she’d warned Diana to avoid the sexual advances of any strange, fair-haired man during the next six months. Not a very imminent danger in Diana’s case, one might think, and so all the more reason to have left well enough alone. Then, when Diana had chosen the Five of Pentacles—reversed!—from the fanned-out deck, what could Brenda say? The most innocent Querent could tell by a glance at that card—two beggars on a snowy night passing before a church window—that it boded ill. And Waite’s pronouncement, in his “Key to the Tarot,” was memorably dire: “Disorder, chaos, ruin, discord, profligacy.” Brenda had limited herself to “You seem to be going through a period of great stress,” and left it at that.

  “Another card,” said Brenda. “And this will be the last.”

  Diana stretched her hand toward the cards spread out before Brenda, hesitated, trembling, like the planchet of a Ouija board, and chose… the Queen of Swords, reversed.

  “Oh, Lord,” said Diana.

  “She’s your problem,” said Brenda decisively, for this was another card that allowed little leeway for a benign interpretation. “It’s a woman you know. I think it’s someone you work with. And she has behaved very treacherously toward you. Or she’s about to. It explains all those other cards. It’s as though this woman has cast a shadow across your whole life. I can’t say more than that. But you can. You know who it is, don’t you?”

  Diana nodded.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” Brenda swept up the cards decisively. “I’ll make some tea. And there’s two slices left of a gooseberry tart. There won’t be any more gooseberries this year. The freezer’s empty, and I don’t know any stores that sell even canned gooseberries. Of course, frozen can’t compare to fresh.”

  Diana seemed relieved by the conversational shift of gears. She smiled a teacherly smile. “You grow your own gooseberries?”

  “I know where to find them. I think they’re feral gooseberries. Tame once, wild now. They grow around behind that marshy area where I showed you my ruins.”

  “That tumbledown shack?”

  “Someone lived there once. Lord knows when. I did my own little archeological dig and came up with all sorts of rusty cans and broken bottles.”

  “No arrowheads?”

  “No, but it might have been Indians living there. It has that feel. Or Native Americans, as you schoolmarms call them nowadays.”

  “Educators, Brenda—not schoolmarms. And yes, I’d like some of the tart. And why do you say”—Diana followed Brenda into her kitchen, which was homey and rustic in a carefully considered way—“it has ‘that feel’? Did Indians dispose of their cans and bottles differently than you or me?”

  “I guess what I meant was that whoever lived there had to be even poorer than the people who lived in this house. Two rooms, three windows, one stove—pretty minimal. And there were children, ‘cause some of the cans were for infant formula.”

  “Isn’t there anyone around here you could ask who lived there?”

  “Nobody along the road goes back more than twenty years. This is the oldest house in the area, and it was standing empty for years before I got in. Just in time, too. If I hadn’t shored up the beams in the basement, it would be just another hole in the ground. There was a whole culture that’s just vanished.”

  “Not quite. There’s still a few kids at my school whose parents are subsistence farmers. They live on the edge of a big marshy area where they stopped developing when swamps became wetlands and had to be preserved. Their folks do roadwork for the county, poach deer, and make do somehow. Ma and Pa Kettle types. The only difference is that nowadays one of the Kettles, or both, are strung out on drugs.”

  Brenda pursed her lips disapprovingly. Her own views on the matter of drug abuse were complicated, and she was not inclined to share them with anyone outside a small circle of intimate friends. Basically, while disapproving of using drugs for recreational or mood-altering purposes, she thought there was a place for them as part of a program of spiritual development. Shamans and sorcerers had to operate outside the dos and don’ts of everyday life. They transcended ordinary morality. Transcendence was, in fact, their special calling.

  She busied herself making tea. If she’d been by herself she’d have dunked a teabag in a cup of water and zapped it in the microwave. But paying customers expected more ceremony, and especially this customer, who had made the very pot and the two misshapen cups in which the tea was to be served. Brenda had no less than four such hand-thrown tea services, each one of a distinctive and characteristic ungainliness, each one reserved for the visits
of the potter who’d given them to Brenda. At other times such misbegotten pottery was kept out of sight in a cupboard devoted to these and other pariah gifts.

  Of them all, Diana’s was the most thorough botch—the spout and handle of the pot both visibly out of true, the lid ill-fitting, the colors sickly with a glaze that had blistered into the ceramic equivalent of eczema when it was fired. The cups were just as ugly and tended to scald the tongue and burn the fingers.

  “Such beautiful cups,” Brenda said, setting the tea tray in the circle of light beneath the faux-Tiffany lampshade that hung over the kitchen table. “The beauty of simplicity. Form follows function. Excuse me a moment, will you? I’ve something in my eye.”

  In the little hallway connecting the bathroom to the kitchen, Brenda stooped down and pushed aside a stack of paperbacks to get at the switch that turned on the tape recorder. The microphone was tucked up inside the lampshade over the kitchen table. Nine times out of ten the tapes she made at the kitchen table were of no practical value, but she didn’t enjoy the luxury of a professional therapist, who can sit there with pen and notepad in plain sight. And you never knew in advance what little details might prove handy at some later date. The names of old friends or distant relatives, anecdotes from work, childhood memories—all were grist for her mill.

  Back in the kitchen, after the first nibble at the gooseberry tart and the first sip of the sarsaparilla-root tea, Brenda finally couldn’t resist asking Diana about the situation at the Rudy Perpich Elementary School in Willowville. The story had been in the newspapers for almost a year now, sometimes on the front page. Diana hadn’t been involved in any of the fuss, since she’d only been assigned there at the start of the current school year, but she did have a grandstand seat.

  “So whose side are you on?” Brenda insisted, after Diana had at first claimed to be an innocent and uncomprehending bystander who knew no more than she read in the papers and saw on TV. “I don’t mean like in a law court. Emotionally.”

  “Oh, emotionally, I’m on the teacher’s side, of course—though I’ve never met her. Miss Armour’s suspended from teaching until the trial is over. But I’ve talked to the other teachers who knew her, and they’re all convinced that she sensed something. The child had been abused, in some way or other—no one doubts that.”

  “But the satanic element…?”

  Diana furrowed her brow. “That may have been exaggerated. Children that age aren’t always clear about the difference between fantasy and reality. The Blair child was in the first grade when the abuse was discovered. Lord knows when it began.”

  “Her name is Blair? The papers don’t give her name or any details about her.”

  Diana nodded her head. “Vanessa Blair. She’s not at our school anymore, of course. Since the school itself is one of the codefendants. Ten million dollars is a lot of money, and if they were only suing Miss Armour and Professor Hutchinson—”

  “That’s the psychologist who testified at the first trial?”

  Diana nodded. “But she’s not much better off than Miss Armour. But if the school’s a codefendant, then the parents stand to end up with a bundle. The county has deep pockets.”

  “What I’ve heard is that some of the other teachers at the school have testified against Armour. And against the principal.”

  “Oh, it’s become a regular witch-hunt, all right. They’re claiming that Mrs. Burroughs, the principal, tried to get Vanessa and another girl to make charges against one of the teachers, Jack Oelker, who testified for the defense at the first trial. He’s been transferred out of the school at his own request, and in fact it’s his second-grade class that I’m subbing for.”

  “Was the idea that he’d abused them, too?”

  Diana nodded. “The Blairs had had him to dinner at their house several times. They were close. It was natural to wonder. But at the trial the other girl gave the impression that Mrs. Burroughs had tried to get her to make up stories against Jack Oelker. Not satanic abuse, but fondling, suggestive remarks. And that’s all part of the official record now. And it’s true that Mrs. Burroughs probably did get more involved than she should have. But it’s hard to blame her. She’s concerned for the children’s welfare.”

  “And now they’re trying to get rid of her?”

  “The school board is divided on the issue. So is the school. Not just the teachers. In the upper grades it’s like the Civil War. The students have very strong feelings, pro and con. There’s been vandalism. Some of the PTA members are circulating a petition to have the school shut down permanently. Just bus the children somewhere else. But the county won’t consider that, because it would be tantamount to admitting the school was responsible.”

  “And if they admit that, it’ll cost ten million?”

  “Well, that’s what the Blairs are asking. They might not get as much as that, but they’ll probably get a big settlement.”

  Brenda shook her head with an all-purpose disapproval that said “What a world!” without placing the blame anywhere in particular. She’d had the feeling, other times she’d talked with Diana, that she’d been more upset by the situation at the school than she was admitting to now. That there was some kind of personal involvement. She was holding something back, but what?

  As though in answer to the unasked question, Diana began to cry. She had just lifted the last forkful of the gooseberry tart to her lips when the tears started—quiet, incapacitating tears that Brenda encouraged by fetching the box of Kleenex from the top of the refrigerator.

  Brenda took a professional satisfaction in any such outburst on the part of a client. An astrologer—which she chiefly was; the tarot readings were just a sideline—is a kind of psychotherapist. The goal is the same, to help people get in touch with the feelings they’ve stuffed away out of reach. An astrologer just uses different tools to make that connection. Brenda had clients whose tears came like clockwork. She would do their charts, then they’d sit down for a cup of tea and chat for five or ten minutes, and the tears would well up. They’d have their cry, snuffle an apology, and make their good-byes.

  But Diana wasn’t like that. Her feelings were sealed up like wine in a corked bottle. She would talk about the anger she was feeling, or the pain, even the love. She knew she should be feeling something, so she invented emotions appropriate to the occasion. But it had always been, till now, just talk.

  Brenda waited until Diana had had a sufficiently good cry, and then asked, “What is it, Diana? Tell me, that’s what I’m here for.”

  “The thing that’s happening at the school,” she began, wiping the tears away with a tissue from the box. “It brought back… memories. Of my own childhood.”

  “Memories…” Brenda prompted.

  “What happened to Vanessa Blair… it happened to me, too. I’d forgotten the whole thing, but then the memories started coming back.” She blew her nose in the damp Kleenex. “Terrible memories.” She took another Kleenex and dabbed at her eyes. Blinked. And forced a brave smile.

  Brenda was not about to leave it at that. “You were abused?”

  Diana nodded. “In the smokehouse, which was up the hill behind our house near Leech Lake. Where I grew up. I was twelve.” She closed her eyes and furrowed her brow. “And it must have been about this time of year. I can remember there was snow inside the smokehouse. The roof had caved in, but otherwise it was still solid. The door could be closed, and locked.”

  “Who was it that abused you, Diana? Was it someone… close to you?”

  “It was my father.”

  I should have known, Brenda thought to herself. It all fit together now. Diana was, in fact, a classic case.

  “You don’t have to tell me any more now if you don’t want to. But you might feel better if you do. Sometimes it helps if the pain can be shared.”

  4

  The smokehouse was still there on the hill behind the farmhouse. It was the Kellog farmhouse now, and had been for many years, but the name on the mailbox still said TURN
EY. The Kellogs got their mail in a box at the post office, since Carl didn’t trust the neighbors’ kids or, for that matter, the neighbors.

  Carl had always meant to get the smokehouse back in working order, but like a lot of other good intentions, that had been put on a back shelf. Janet had wanted to have the thing torn down and the whole area around it plowed up and turned into a vegetable garden, but she was as much of a procrastinator as he was. So it stayed as it was, the busted roof mended with a five-dollar sheet of plastic, the hinges and the latch on the door dark with rust, the paint peeled away except in a few patches.

  In the summer it provided a home for bats, and a large garter snake lived under the stone floor. Generations of wasps had built their nests inside the flue of the chimney, and seen them fall to ruin and built again.

  And always Wes was there. Not in the flesh, of course. His flesh had long since rotted away in its coffin in the small cemetery beside the Methodist church in Leech Lake. Not even in the spirit, if that is taken to mean that there was some conscious entity that haunted the smokehouse and knew itself, once, to have been the man Wes Turney. A spirit that might manifest itself, in the right circumstances, to the senses of the living. He had no shape or smell. Nor could he whisper, as ghosts are sometimes thought to whisper, “Remember me.”

  But he was there, and his presence could be felt, for it was that which drew the bats to congregate beneath the broken two-by-fours of the roof and bid the snake inhabit its dark labyrinth under the flagstone floor and made the wasps welcome within the chimney flue. It was his presence that made the vagrant deer hesitate as they approached the stand of birches before the padlocked door, and snort, and turn away.

  He was there because he had no choice. A crime had been committed, years ago, inside its four narrow walls, and until the crime had been atoned for, some undying essence of what had been Wes Turney must remain where the blood of that crime had darkened the wood and stone. He was rooted to the spot like a tree, and like a tree he had grown. Not visibly, for he was not visible. What had grown was a potentiality for evil. If it could have been mapped, it would have resembled layer upon layer of delicate dark lace billowing about the smokehouse, swelling and shrinking like the translucent membranes of a sea anemone, rising sometimes above the small building like a plume of smoke from the chimney, at other times spreading through the underbrush like cilia, searching for the sustenance it was always denied: revenge, recompense, release.