Harvestman Lodge (63 page)

“Nothing will go wrong, Jang. You can count on me.”

“I’ve heard your promises before, Lukey. This time you’ll be required to live up to what you say.”

“I’ll do it.”

Jang pointed at the image of the little girl in the newspaper. “You will harvest this flower?”

“I can. I will.”

“No mistakes?”

“No mistakes.”

Jang grinned and chuckled, looking at the girl’s face. “And so another blossom is found. Another bloom to brighten the Garden. A special moment, eh, my friend?”

“Special like a dream.”

“Make the dream real, my friend. Don’t damage the flower, and don’t be caught. This place you are from has been good to us before, and harvesting this lovely blossom will make it good to us again. And give you at least the chance to harvest other flowers.”

Lukey might have wept in relief. It appeared he could survive after all. He watched Jang still studying the newspaper image, and thought,
Hello from the Parvins, Ben Buckingham. Remember us? Remember me?

Chapter Thirty-Eight

ELI PICKED UP MELINDA IN HER DRIVEWAY and began to fill her in on the developments in the life of Curtis Stokes. She expressed her happiness at the news, as Eli had anticipated, while at the same time seemed on edge and distracted.

“Do you think Curtis’s fiance will be there tonight?” Melinda asked.

“I don’t know,” Eli said. “And frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine what she’ll be like if we do meet her. I mean, Curtis is a wonderful man, one of my favorite people in this county … but you have to admit his history and lack of means isn’t going to appeal to a lot of women. A woman who has agreed to marry him might be, well, as “Curtis-crazy” as he is.”

“As he
used
to be, you should say.”

“Yeah. If he’s really telling us the truth about having gotten over his pole shadow problem.”

“You’re a cynic, Eli.”

“Not a cynic, no. But also not gullible. Lifetime-long mental health issues don’t go away all that fast, I don’t think. I’ll be more inclined to believe Curtis is cured when I actually see him walk unimpeded down a street lined with telephone poles on a sunny afternoon.”

“Well, I suppose you’re just more empirically oriented. Me, I just like so much the idea of things finally going better for him that I’m eager to believe him.”

“It’s one of the things I like about you, Melinda. Your kindness of heart.”

“That’s the best compliment you’ve ever given me, Eli.”

“Really? I’d have thought you’d consider the best one to be the time I told you what a soul-stirring experience it is to follow you up a staircase when you’re wearing that faded pair of tight jeans I like so well.”

“Eli?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

“I knew that was what you were going to say. See? I’ve got you so figured out now I can predict your words.” He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger and smiled smugly at her. “Psychic.”

“Eyes on the road, Kreskin!”

“I knew you were going to say that, too.”

“Then you probably already know that I’m about to call you a few names you’ll be surprised to hear coming out of my good-girl mouth. Because sometimes your constant attempts to be funny drive me up the … oh, there he is! We’re here!”

Curtis Stokes was standing just where he said he’d be: at the end of a gravel driveway that ran down to the street out of a thoroughly grown-over corner lot. It looked more like a footpath than a driveway, the unrestrained vegetation on both sides having heavily encroached. Further, because there was no pavement on the driveway, abundant weeds and undergrowth also had come up through and around the gravel, so the driveway was almost erased.

Eli pulled to the side of the street and parked. Melinda looked at the wall of vegetation pressing the Rambler’s passenger-side door. “I’ll crawl out your side,” she told Eli.

“Take a look!” Curtis Stokes said as they approached him. He stepped into the street and trotted up toward its higher, sunny end, where there were no tall shading trees, but several utility poles. Four pole shadows stretched at slight angles completely across the pavement.

Curtis marched to the closest shadow and stopped. He wheeled and faced Eli and Melinda, and with a playful grin backstepped into the shadow.

Instantly the grin vanished and he began to spasm and jerk … shoulders shaking as if someone gripped them, body trembling and convulsing. Oddly, Curtis didn’t push on through the shadow, but stayed where he was, shaking.

Eli and Melinda were running toward him when he suddenly stopped convulsing and jumped into a feet-and-hands-spread “ta-da!” posture like a magician at the conclusion of a successful trick. Curtis burst into laughter. He stood in the shadow, unaffected now, and guffawed.

“Fooled ya!” he said. “You thought it had me grabbed good, didn’t you!”

Melinda reached him and hugged him. “Oh, Curtis, I ought to kick you instead of hug you! I thought it had you for sure!”

Eli came up beside Melinda. “Are you all right, Curtis?”

Still standing calmly in the pole shadow, Curtis chuckled. “Of course I’m all right. There’s nothing in a shadow to hurt nobody. There never has been. I know that now, really know it, so now I just grin when I walk through pole shadows.”

“When you first went into this one, though, you were shaking like a leaf,” Eli said.

“I was playing with you two. I was imitating the way Custer Crosswaite imitates me. That’s all it was.”

“My father used to threaten to ‘jerk a knot into my tail’ when I made him mad,” Eli said. “I ought to do the same to you.”

“Aw, I was just funning. Check this out,” Curtis said. He turned and trotted up the slightly inclining street to the next shadow. He stepped into it, turned to face them again, and smiled. Next shadow, same thing, and the last one as well. Then he walked back down through all four shadows in perfectly casual fashion, not stopping or showing off, just walking.

“I believe you really have put your problem behind you, Curtis,” Eli said.

“Told you!”

The group reached the end of the driveway again and Curtis led them into the thicket that fully engulfed the lot. The growth was dense, but once past the edge of it they saw paths through the brushwood, narrow but sufficient to allow movement through and across the yard. Anyone doing so at this time of year, though, would be fully invisible from the streets because of the leafy growth.

“How many people know about these paths, Curtis?” Melinda asked.

“Just the few who need to,” he replied. “The pizza man, the water meter guy, the electric company man, the gas man, the delivery people … they know. Every now and then little boys will sneak back in here to shoot bb guns and such, or to look for a place they can smoke without getting caught, but when they find the house and see the lot ain’t really empty, they generally run off fast. Every now and then me or Coleman will get near the window with the shade closed if there’s boys sneaking around through the paths, and make a ghosty moan or yell, or holler out ‘Flee or die!’ – that’s what Coleman usually hollers, anyway – and them boys will nearly tear out a brand new path, trying to get away.”

“Have any of the parents of those boys come to the house to complain about their sons being threatened?” Melinda asked.

“Lord, no!” Curtis answered. “They all think Coleman is a crazy man because he lives like this. They figure he’s dangerous and stay away. He knows they think that and he just laughs at them for it. He likes to be left alone, but doing it by living here he can still be right in town, close to doctors and grocery stores and police and all that, but still be by himself. Except for me, of course, and the lady who comes in to clean.”

“Who is that lady?” Eli asked, following a hunch.

The hunch was verified by Curtis’s answer. “Miz Flora. Flora Hamilton. I like her.”

“So do we. She’s taking care of the building where Melinda and I work now, since her brother, Jimbo Bailey, has gotten sick.”

“Yeah, she said that.”

Melinda got close to Eli and whispered, “What kind of housekeeping can do you do in a place that’s gone to seed like this?”

Entrance through the basement door and a trip up the stairs to the main floor answered Melinda’s question quickly and surprisingly. The door at the top of the stairs opened into a kitchen that was big, well-furnished, and sparkling clean. The kitchen, featuring what appeared to be commercial appliances, was worthy of a chef.

In fact, the man hard at work in that kitchen was wearing a traditional chef’s pleated toque and white clothing, and beamed a jovial smile at Melinda as she came through the door.

“Oh, dear lovely friend, Miss Buckingham!” he said, abandoning the dish he was stirring and going to her with arms outstretched. Eli was learning all the time just how well-known the Buckingham family was. Particularly Melinda, who had public exposure through her television job.

Francois Ansel was a self-described Frenchman, though everyone in Kincheloe County knew he had been born in Perkins Creek and, apart from having parents who were natives of France, was as much an East Tennessean as anyone else in the region. Ansel even readily admitted that the French accent that flavored his booming voice heard through the swinging kitchen door in his small but popular Tylerville restaurant, was mostly affected, an imitation of his father’s speech patterns and done to fulfill customer expectations. Run into Ansel at a local hardware store on a Saturday afternoon, and the accent was much less pronounced.

“Good to see you, Chef!” Melinda said. “I didn’t know we’d be enjoying your cuisine tonight!”

“I give you my promise you will find it delightful! It is not
haute cuisine
this night, but Chef Ansel will make it seem so, my child.”

“I’m hardly a child anymore, Chef.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and studied her at arm’s length, up and down. “No, my dear one, you most surely are not. Oh my, no. It has been too long since I’ve seen you.”

Eli intruded a little and put his hand out toward Ansel. “Eli Scudder,” he said. “I’m with the
Clarion
, and I’m Melinda’s boyfriend.”

“Then you are a fortunate man,” said the middle-aged chef. “Any man would be honored to be in company with such a lovely one. It is too bad I’m not younger so I could compete with you for her.”

Eli wanted to say: “I hear Hadley King is available,” but knew better than to do that.

“Excellent work, your novel is, Mr. Scudder.”

The last words came not from the chef, but from a rather unkempt aging man who had just entered the kitchen behind Eli with the aid of a folding aluminum walker. Coleman Caldwell apparently had made some meager effort to dress for the evening, though his garb was about fifteen years out of date, the wide-lapel sportcoat made of pure ‘70s polyester and not even an approximate match with his misshapen knit tie and checked pants of some equally synthetic fabric.

“Thank you, sir,” Eli said. “Mr. Caldwell, I presume?”

“Why, no … I am my sister.” Caldwell laughed heartily and moved his walker forward to put out his hand. His fingers were gnarled by arthritis and Eli shook the hand only lightly. “Just having fun with you, my boy. I am Coleman Caldwell, retired lawyer, unrepentant troublemaker, raging moderate and sometimes liberal, hermit, and fellow published scribbler of fiction. A distinction that, to my knowledge, only you and I possess within this county. Pleased to meet you.”

“Mr. Caldwell, sir, I’m honored to be your guest tonight. It was an unexpected invitation and a welcome one.”

“I do hope you enjoy French cuisine. Chef Ansel is a master, as the wonderful aromas emanating from my kitchen attest.”

“I do love French cuisine.”

“I like about anything,” piped in Curtis Stokes. “I reckon that includes French food, ’cause I sure do love a good french fry.”

Ansel muttered something in his parents’ native tongue and cast his eyes heavenward.

“Come, my friends, let me show you my home,” said Caldwell.

IN A TOWN OF FREQUENT SURPRISES, Eli would never encounter another as baffling as the interior of Tylerville’s most vegetation-overgrown home. Despite a lot that was little more than a massive thicket, and a house so obscured it was invisible from the street, the house’s interior was perfectly maintained and marvelously clean. Fine old hardwood floors gleamed in the two-story structure and perfectly painted walls were hung with original works of art – no old masters, but quality paintings nonetheless, mostly by respected early American artists and a few surprisingly good ones by Caldwell’s late mother, who had been adept at landscapes. The house’s furniture was of the best quality. The only obvious interior visual evidence of the wilderness outside was the coverage of the windows by ivy climbing across the panes, blocking almost all natural light. Yet the house was wonderfully lighted; Caldwell did not scrimp on light bulbs and electricity.

Shelves loaded with books stood against almost every wall, and the books themselves bore library-styled labels with letters and numbers indicating a classification system. It wasn’t the traditional Dewey system; when Caldwell saw Eli studying the labels he told him that he’d come up with his own scheme of classification that worked well for him. “Name a book in my collection and I can put my hand on it within two minutes, tops,” he declared.