Page 37 of The Forest of Lost Souls

She gets to her feet and approaches the front door and halts. “The envelope. The documents.”

When Bead reaches down and plucks the envelope from the table, Vida hikes up her sweatshirt from her right hip and draws the can of bear spray from the holster attached to her belt, the only defensive weapon she’d thought necessary.

Whatever Bead sees from the corner of his eye, it’s enough to make him drop the envelope, reach under his coat, and pull a pistol from his shoulder rig. As he turns toward her, the expanding cloud of repellent is still dense when it bursts against his face, oiling him with an instant sheen. Tears flood his eyes, severely blurring his vision. His pupils will have instantly swelled wide, letting in a blinding farrago of amorphous shapes of light. She gives him the full seven-second charge, so that though he turns his face away, he remains in the cloud of capsaicin. Then she throws the can aside. Even as Bead is retching, he’s gasping for breath,like a two-headed beast in conflict with itself. He can’t find fresh air, feels as if he’s suffocating. His ears should be ringing as loud as a siren, further disorienting him.

He opens fire. He can’t see her. She’d be dead if he could discern even the vague shape of her. But he fires a round and then another, trusting to luck and proximity, a power freak suddenly powerless, frightened and furious. The hard crack of each shot is reverberant and hollow, as though Bead and Vida are kenneled by the porch, the cacophony of bestial combat trapped and ricocheting along metaled walls.

The cloud of repellent expands past Bead and beyond the porch, but though its diffusion is propelled by highly pressurized gas, the peppery particulate appears to disperse sluggishly. It seems to Vida that both she and her assailant are moving in slow motion, as though the watch spring of the universe has unwound, time itself running out. She holds her breath as she steps into the third shot, which tunnels through the air maybe a foot wide of her. Violence is by its nature swift, but in this moment of mortal danger, she picks up a rocking chair and rams her assailant with it as if moving through some viscous fluid. Like a deep-sea diver laboring under miles of water, he staggers backward into the porch balustrade, reflexively firing the gun once more.

That shot sets right the universe, and time surges full speed. As Bead falls, he seems to fling the pistol away as if shocked by it. The weapon clatters across the porch floor, and Vida quickens after it, breath held and eyes squinted to slits.

Gun in hand, she turns to Belden Bead, where he sits on the porch floor with his back against the railing balusters, eyes still pools of tears but his breathing no longer labored, as though some source of mercy has granted him surcease from the effectsof bear spray. In his fall, he has shot himself in his left leg, his thigh. Judging by the blood spreading through the fabric of his suit pants and across the planking, she figures the bullet severed the femoral artery. He is bleeding out fast, and he knows it.

If his recognition of his fate should humble him, it does not, and neither does imminent death wring from him a plea for help. He doesn’t damn her, as she might expect, but contents himself with calling her names that deny her personhood, that reduce her to an inanimate sex toy, a tool for masturbation. In sprays of jalapeño spittle, various obscene words for one female anatomical feature spew from him repetitively, with increasing ferocity, as if this is not a man insulting her, but instead a demonic parasite that resides in Bead and hates her because it will be evicted from this world when its host dies.

Vida stands over him, watching him die, offering Bead no aid, no pity. If something possesses him, it does so at his invitation, and if nothing has possessed him, he is a self-made monster, the spiritual brother of the man who killed her father, conspirator in the death of José Nochelobo, one of the legions who lust for power and draw across the world a darkness that denies the light by which the universe was conceived.

He falls silent, and his eyes widen, and for a moment Vida thinks he has died. Suspended over the abyss by a gossamer filament of life, he speaks in a raw, thin, quavering voice colored by what might be wonder or even awe. “Who are you? What are you? Where did it come from, the moon, so big behind you?”

Twilight has not yet arrived. The moon has not yet risen.

Belden Bead breathes out the last of his life.

She can’t report what’s happened. They will distort the facts into proof of murder. For her, Kettleton offers no law or justice.

33

THE SECOND GRAVE

Having foregone embalming and the attention of a mortuary’s makeup artist, rolled for a few revolutions in a drop cloth secured with duct tape, his pistol and small squeeze bottle of chloroform wrapped with him, Belden Bead, crime lord of the mountains, lies on the porch, waiting for burial without honors. Wisely, he had brought no cell phone that, by its GPS pings archived in the cloud, could have proved he’d come here. Now the meadow and the forested uplands stand testament to the truth that those who lust and live for power contribute nothing useful to the world other than the nutrients that their decomposition will add to the soil.

After hosing away the blood and letting the planking dry to see what stains may still need to be addressed, Vida sits for a while on the porch steps, thinking through the actions she’ll take. She must be sure to see through the surface of the situation, understand all the possibilities that could take root beneath it.

She senses truth in Bead’s insistence that the murder of José was a deviation from the protocols by which Terrence Boschvark labors for his billions. The great man has so many minions in the ruling class and bureaucracy that he can accomplish his ends with only rare resort to physical violence. However, if he had arranged José’s assassination, Boschvark had indeed placed himself in suchjeopardy that he wouldn’t take half measures with Vida. If he thought she had discovered the truth or was even just searching for it, he would deal with her no less violently than he dealt with José. When such hard measures are taken, men like him don’t follow them with half measures. Boschvark wouldn’t go to the bother of manufacturing evidence that Ogden bribed the assessor to alter the county land maps, so that Vida could be evicted.

Therefore, it’s almost certain that Bead—alarmed by Vida’s investigation, without approval from Boschvark—concocted the threat to destroy José’s reputation with a trove of child pornography. Bead alone schemed to manipulate Vida into writing the letter he wanted. Bead, not Boschvark, crafted the text of the letter so that, if she had written what he dictated, authorities could view it as something she meant to give to José but never had the chance to deliver before his death. If the letter was found with the envelope of documents from the assessor’s office, the assumption would be made that the discovery of the kiddie porn had left her in shame and despair, after which the prospect of eviction was all she needed to conclude life was no longer worth living.

Consequently, this was Bead’s scheme, as he claimed, and he most likely hasn’t told anyone that he was coming here. He must have an accomplice in the assessor’s office, someone who had no choice but to do his bidding for whatever reason, someone willing to attest to the authenticity of the forged documents if it comes to that but who is unlikely to know that Bead meant to deliver them in person and then murder her. No one knows where Bead is—or can know where he’s gone when he vanishes.

If anyone other than Bead has learned of her visit to Morgan Slyke, that person might suspect she’s somehow involved in Bead’s disappearance. However, if she seems to back away from furtherinvestigation of José’s death, no one will have reason to pursue her. Knowing Bead, they might intuit what he attempted and to what end his intentions led him, but the sheriff isn’t likely to arrive with a brace of deputies and commence digging for the Plymouth Superbird Hemi, because that will literally be opening a very big can of worms.

Night has come. The moon has risen above the cold and barren granite peaks of the mountains. A few isolate clouds, shaped into arctic masses, drift across the sky, reflecting the lunar light as might icebergs on a northern sea. Great horned owls, vigilant for prey, arehoo-hoodooing one another, now and then taking wing to chase down earthbound creatures with devastating effect, in this world of the perpetual hunt.

Finished analyzing the situation, Vida ties a rope to the wrapped cadaver and drags it off the porch, down the steps, to the nearby Plymouth in which Bead arrived. With effort, she wrestles the grave-readied bundle onto the back seat.

From the multipurpose building behind the house, she retrieves the John Deere backhoe with which Uncle Ogden had, among other things, excavated the cavity for the massive septic tank that he had constructed and with which, fifteen years later, Vida had dug her uncle’s grave. The backhoe features a roof rack of lights, and it’s a workhorse, but the job ahead of her is formidable. Ideally, the finished hole at the southern end of the meadow will be three feet wider, a foot longer, and three feet deeper than the car. She’ll have to construct it with a ramp leading down to that space in which the vehicle will rest.

The ruckus of the backhoe engine rackets across the grassland and through the trees, but there are no neighbors near enough tobe disturbed. And those who choose to live in this remote territory are as incurious as they expect others to be.

With the aid of quarts of black coffee, several big chocolate-chip cookies that she had baked the previous day, and mint-flavored antacid tablets, Vida finishes the first phase of the job shortly past four o’clock in the morning, after eight hours of unrelenting effort. With the moon far into its descent, she drives the Plymouth and its profoundly silent passenger down the ramp and into the hole. She parks closer to the right flank of the pit than to the left, so that she is able to open the driver’s door wide enough to slip out of the car.

Although she’s exhausted, she returns to the backhoe. She fills the space around the car and begins to cover it.

An hour after sunrise, with songbirds gracing the day and hawks taking up the hunt that the nocturnal raptors have forsaken until dusk, the Plymouth is concealed under six or eight inches of soil. The situation is not ideal, but Vida can do no more until she has gotten some rest.

Later, fortified by five hours of sleep and a hearty breakfast eaten past noon, she returns to her work. Even after the Plymouth lies three feet below the meadow and she’s driven over it uncounted times to compact the fill, a big mound of excavated earth remains. Over the next few days, she will distribute it across the southern end of the meadow, although some will have to be kept at the site to be added to the grave as the loose soil naturally settles and forms into a telltale declivity. Eventually, she’ll gather ripened grass and strip it and scatter its seeds across the bare earth.

She garages the backhoe for the day. A hot shower is bliss.

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