Devil's Oven Read online

  “Bullshit,” Dwight said. “Skye’s jerking us around. I saw her old lady at the House of Waffles falling all over some drunk guy.”

  When Bud didn’t respond right away, Dwight sighed.

  “A day or two,” Bud said. As he hung up, he heard Dwight’s regretful shit on the other end of the line.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ivy found Thora sitting on the front porch swing, smoking her morning cigarette. Thora didn’t look at her but kept staring out at the wet highway.

  Despite her heavy frame, Thora’s face had retained its sharpness. She still had their father’s strong nose and blocky jaw. Her eyes were clear, always questioning, always interested. She kept her shoulders hunched forward, as though she were ashamed of her large bosom. With the exception of the fine cotton nightgowns that Ivy made for her, Thora wore mannish, unadorned clothes. Before her weight and diabetes had forced her to start using a cane, she had towered over Ivy, intimidating her both mentally and physically. But Ivy remembered that Thora had been almost pretty once. Certainly far prettier than Ivy had felt before her own harelip was repaired. Thora had had dignity. Thora had carried herself like a queen. The young Ivy had very much admired queens.

  Ivy had only had a couple of hours’ sleep and she was anxious, but she made herself sit down on the top step and pretend she was getting on with her day and that her pulse wasn’t racing, ready to propel her off the porch and up the hill to the trailer.

  Anthony (that was his name, surely; the words Saint Anthony were tattooed in ornate blue and gold letters across his back, with a delicate white lily floating beneath them—how perfect) had begun to seem like a dream to her, but she clung to a grain of certainty that he was real. She even had the small bandage on her thumb as proof of how she had spent the night. When she left him, just before dawn, she had covered him with a light blanket in case he got cold. She tried to tell herself she was being silly, that he couldn’t feel anything. Still. Just in case.

  “What do you want for dinner tonight?” Ivy said. Sitting, she folded the sides of her wide skirt over her knees so it wouldn’t drag on the rain-spattered stoop.

  “I miss lamb chops,” Thora said. “We never have lamb chops anymore. When Daddy was alive, we used to have them all the time.”

  “All you have to do is ask,” Ivy said. “The grocery lamb isn’t bad. We’ve got a package I picked up on sale a couple of weeks ago. And if you want fresh, the Hutsenpillars are sure to have lambs by now. There’s plenty of room in the big freezer.”

  Thora took a final drag off the cigarette and stubbed it into the sand-filled bucket at her feet. As she blew out the last of the smoke, she began to cough. The brutal sound made Ivy want to cover her ears. It hurt her to see Thora struggling for breath. She had begun to need oxygen several times a day.

  So many times in Ivy’s life she had wanted to get away, to make a life for herself without Thora around to tell her what to do all the time. But she couldn’t leave the mountain. Thora wouldn’t leave, either, even though she claimed to hate it. She said she didn’t believe the stories, even though she and Ivy—with Ivy’s mother’s disappearance, and their father’s suicide—had become one of the stories. Ivy suspected that Thora really did believe, and was just afraid. Afraid to stay, yet afraid to leave. A lot of people felt that way about Devil’s Oven.

  Thora had been fifteen years old when her father married Ivy’s mother, and just twenty-one the year Ivy’s mother disappeared up on the mountain and Thora—poor Thora!—found their father hanging from a hickory tree not far off the trail. Ivy hadn’t seen it, but she had pictured it in her mind a thousand times. She knew the tree—one of their few maples, just out of view of the house. Her father had helped her climb it many times. Just a few branches up. Not too far.

  Hold on, Ivy! Brace your feet. Look ahead to the next branch. And her mother: Not too high! Her father laughing, standing, watching, just beneath the limb where he would later die. He didn’t tell anyone why. Left no note.

  Thora could have turned Ivy over to Child Services and walked away, but she hadn’t. Sympathy had gotten her a job at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where their father had worked, and she had spent the next several years giving Ivy a grudging, reluctant kind of care. Ivy could remember a time when Thora’s approval mattered very much.

  “It’s not like I can’t cook,” Thora said. “I’ll call the Hutsenpillars myself.”

  Ivy picked at some lint on her apron, thinking. Thora was always telling her she attracted bits of thread like metal to a magnet.

  Finally, she got up and went into the house to retrieve her canvas barn jacket and mushrooming bag from the front closet. She had wasted too much time humoring Thora. She needed to get up to the trailer.

  Thora watched her come back onto the porch, her brow furrowed in disapproval.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Ivy said. She pulled her muck boots from the storage bench beside the door, and sat down on the bench to change into them. “After all this rain, there should be plenty of mushrooms. They’ll be good with chops.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Thora said, stabbing a forefinger at her. “You’re acting like a ten-year-old, getting in a snit and disappearing up to the trailer or up on the mountain. You think I haven’t noticed?”

  Ivy tied the mushrooming bag around her waist and dropped the knife into her apron pocket. “The Phelps girl is coming at eleven so I can fit her wedding dress,” she said. “I’ll be back before then.”

  “You can’t hide up there forever,” Thora said. “Things change. They can’t stay the same all the time.”

  Ivy barely heard her. Looking out over the yard, she saw how the raindrops sparkled on the dormant grass. It was like she was seeing everything with new eyes.

  • • •

  Ivy’s heart pounded as she climbed the trail. She knew she could have gone inside the trailer right away, but she didn’t want to feed Thora’s suspicions. Thora was weak but not stupid. It took every ounce of willpower Ivy had to not look back to see if Thora was watching her.

  When Ivy turned seven years old, Thora had finally let her go walking on the mountain alone, as long as she promised not to go past the dirt fire road that ran about a third of the way up the mountainside. After their parents were gone, Thora had refused to take her up there, and Ivy had almost lost her memories of it.

  The fire road was about a fifteen-minute climb, but there were no other trails anywhere close to their land, no other occupied homes, only the stone remains of chimneys belonging to long-crumbled cabins, or bits of rough rope tied to trees from which some kind of shelter had hung. The woods were so quiet that she could always hear the state’s Department of Natural Resources trucks or hikers coming and had plenty of time to hide from them. As a child, she had pretended that the entire mountain belonged to her and her alone. Of course, it wasn’t long before she ventured beyond the fire road, and eventually to the top of the ridge. Over the years she had seen any number of black bears and four or five bobcats. The only things on Devil’s Oven that frightened Ivy were the abandoned dogs that roamed in packs, looking for food.

  The trail was mucky but passable because the spring rains hadn’t yet begun in earnest. One year, after the rains, she’d had to spend weeks clearing the trail of fallen limbs and debris carried down the mountainside.

  She crossed the fire road and walked east a little way toward the cabin site she had gone to so often with her mother. Almost two hundred years of curiosity seekers had kept it relatively free of brush and trees; you could still sit on the cabin’s smooth hearthstone. The site was supposed to be haunted, but it was also a good place to hunt for mushrooms.

  • • •

  It was a clump of false morels, dense and red as cock’s comb, growing close to a log that had led her to Anthony. They were often poisonous, but they were so beautiful that she couldn’t help but bend down to inspect them. The hand lying beside them was loosely covered with dirt. It wasn’t hard to tell what it w
as.

  How strange!

  And yet…

  How many voices had she heard in the wind when she was on the mountain?

  How many people—like her mother—had disappeared here, or lost their way, never to be seen again?

  Not thirty feet away was the broad rock threshold of the cabin that had burned here, the one belonging to a woman who—well over a hundred winters earlier—had bludgeoned her husband and one of her children. She had gone mad, people said. So mad that she had murdered her infant son and hanged herself in the forest using her own nightgown. Ivy and her mother had brought bouquets of garden flowers here, but Ivy had been too young to understand why. Later, it was Thora who told her the story when she was still far too young to hear it. Some thought the daughter who escaped had hidden in the hollow of a tree until her mother passed by, then walked off the mountain, never to be seen again. As a child, Ivy sometimes hid beneath her own bed, pretending to be the brave daughter who had escaped death.

  With the dirt brushed away, she stroked the hand. Maybe it was because the texture of the skin was so similar to the many mushrooms she had handled that she wasn’t afraid. She picked it up.

  Balancing the thing on her palm, the tips of its enormous fingers resting in the crevices between her own, she held it up to the sky. It was heavy, and didn’t look the least bit dead. In fact, it looked healthy and plump, rich with blood. At the place where it should have been attached to a wrist, there was a smooth stretch of something that wasn’t quite skin; it reminded her of the lengths of casing her father used for venison sausage. She thought of her father’s hands, brown with the life juices of the deer he killed, sawing ribs and sinew away to get to the most tender parts. But there was no trace of blood on this hand. It was a single, perfect thing.

  Still, it was a person’s hand.

  She knew she should run down the mountainside and call the police and lead them back here. It was the right thing to do. If there was a hand, there were probably more parts buried nearby. A person—a whole person, a whole man—belonged to someone: a mother, a father, or maybe even a wife. Someone would be missing him.

  Looking around, she saw other clumps of blood-red false morels. It made an odd kind of sense that they would grow where he was buried.

  She imagined police. Helicopters. Maybe even news vans. They always came when a plane crashed or someone was lost. For a while, anyway. But never here, so close to her part of the mountain, the only place where she could get away from Thora.

  Ivy set the hand on the log and knelt in front of it. She listened to the morning birds in the trees and the trees creaking, settling—sounds that made her think of God walking in the Garden. She closed her eyes and breathed. When she opened her eyes, the hand was still there. It was real. It hadn’t been well hidden; anyone could have found it. But she had been the one, hadn’t she?

  Maybe no one was missing him. Maybe he had always been here. Waiting.

  She slipped the hand into the bag at her waist and tied the cord.

  • • •

  Now, the false morels were gone. All that was left were a few faint depressions that the wind had already filled with leaves.

  Her head felt clearer now that she was up here. She wasn’t so worried about Thora. Why had she ever worried about her? Thora might be at the trailer right now. She might even have discovered Anthony for herself. But Thora wouldn’t do anything. She would wait to talk to Ivy about it, because if something happened to Ivy, Thora would be alone. More than anything else, Thora didn’t want to be alone.

  • • •

  Emerging from the trail, Ivy saw a second car parked near the house. The Phelps girl was early. Ivy smiled to herself. Brides. She felt like a bride herself. Touching her hand to her hair, she pushed it back behind her ear, anticipating. She wanted to be at her best because Anthony was such a handsome man.

  Hoping that Missy and Thora weren’t looking for her out the living room window, she hurried to the back porch of the trailer. She told herself she just needed to see him completed, to check the stitches one more time to make sure they were as secure as she remembered making them.

  The air inside the trailer was musty. She would have to burn some scented candles and crack open the windows now that it was spring.

  “Hello?” she said, not really—not in her heart—expecting an answer. If she had gotten one, what would she have done? Fainted, probably.

  Anthony was still there on the table, most of his body covered with the blanket. Had she really touched him in those hidden places? She blushed to think how bold she had been.

  Standing over him, she marveled at how peaceful he looked in the morning light. She touched his hair tenderly, as one might touch a sleeping child.

  “I’ll come back, Anthony,” she whispered. “Don’t worry.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tripp imagined Lila up there on The Twilight Club’s main stage with the dancers. She liked to get him worked up by stripping down for him at his cabin, and always insisted on a serious fire so that she could start out in lacy panties and a bustier or bra, and finish naked in his lap. She had the body for it, too, more voluptuous than the dancers who worked the stage, and red hair that she loved to shake in his face when she was on top. When she had come back to town married to Bud, there were rumors that she had been a dancer for a while, rumors that got legs when Bud bought The Twilight Club.

  Tripp didn’t believe it—not that it would’ve mattered to him, anyway. It seemed like he had been fantasizing about Lila his whole life, and now he had her. The tiny laugh lines around her eyes didn’t matter, whatever she had done in those years she was gone didn’t matter, her attachment to Bud didn’t matter. He was pussy whipped and didn’t give a damn.

  He motioned for one of the cocktail waitresses to bring him another beer. Lila encouraged him to spend plenty of time at the club. “So I know where you are,” she had said. Did she think she was being cute, putting him under Bud’s nose? But Tripp also knew he was supposed to be keeping half an eye on Bud. There was a twisted kind of logic to it all, but he didn’t like to think too hard about it.

  It wasn’t as though he wanted for female company. He had been a science geek in high school and, despite the shy warmth in his hazel eyes, the glasses he’d had to wear kept the prettiest, popular girls like Lila and her friends away. But he had filled out in college, bulking up alongside more athletic male forestry students, and his current job as a Department of Natural Resources officer meant he had plenty of money for things like laser eye surgery. So what if his coppery blond hair had thinned out some on top? He kept it shorter than strictly required by his superiors, indicating to the poachers and yahoos he ran across daily that he wasn’t someone to screw around with. His pseudo-military look also meant that a certain kind of woman—the kind who had no confidence in herself—didn’t bother him, either. He knew he wasn’t the best-looking guy around, but he was gainfully employed, college educated, and without dependents or a substance abuse problem. In Monroe County, those four things alone meant he could pretty much have any woman he wanted.

  He wore jeans and a comfortable sports shirt, but few of the other men in the bar had bothered to change out of their second-shift work clothes. They sipped beer, barely glancing up at the steel-framed stage, as though they were jaded fifth-graders on their latest field trip to the zoo. The dancers, too, seemed to be going through the motions. The newest girl was the only exception.

  She looked local to him, pale, dark-eyed and pretty in the narrow-faced way of the girls from up in the hills. They showed up at the consolidated high school with hard manners and a fresh mouth or a Pollyanna sweetness that was tough to fake. He hadn’t talked to her yet, but he was sure she would be one of the sweet ones.

  Lila was enough for Tripp, but he couldn’t look away from the new girl’s shining black hair, and the way she caught it with her fingers, hiding her face as though behind a veil. When she threw her head back in a languorous arch of her body, her hai
r brushed the tops of the patent leather boots that stretched to the middle of her thighs. Her white G-string and lacy satin bustier gave her an old-fashioned, almost conservative look, far different from the neon-bright and glossy costumes of the rest of Dwight’s dancers. Her moves were fluid and natural, as though she had been born to it.

  Tripp wandered through the nearly empty tables to lean against the far wall. It was early enough in the week that he had a clear view of the stage.

  Watching the girl, he imagined her ivory body on one of the rougher mountain trails, naked to the approaching nightfall, a lock of her hair caressing the curve of her cheek, her knees drawn up like a baby in the womb. Helpless, and at his mercy. The image made him feel guilty and sick and he looked away at one of the other dancers to push it from his mind. Still, the strobing light on the stage was like moonlight flashing through the trees, and he couldn’t help but look back at her to see the way it reflected—icy blue, like cold death—off her skin. When the waitress showed up with his beer, Tripp didn’t notice her standing there until she finally touched him on the shoulder.

  Lately he had been distracted, zoning out for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour at a time. That morning he had even found himself on a petered-out fire road up on Devil’s Oven, the truck about to wedge itself between a couple of pole-thin pine trees. There was a long scratch through the gold DNR logo on the passenger side of the truck to prove it. Beyond the trees was a steep ravine.

  He knew he wasn’t getting enough sleep. He had gotten to where he didn’t like to sleep alone anymore, and Lila was almost never with him overnight.

  Dwight came over from the bar.

  “What’re you drinking that pansy-ass crap for?” he said, grabbing for Tripp’s imported beer. But Tripp was fast enough to pull the bottle to him so Dwight was left holding air. “I got a G.D. wall full of good liquor and you embarrass me by drinking that foreign shit. What kind of man are you?”