Rockinghorse Read online

  “Have fun.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bowers,” the receptionist told him. “But Mister Garrett, Sr., was declared legally dead three years ago.”

  Lucas stood for a moment, staring at the young woman. He was speechless—For a lawyer, a disconcerting moment. He finally found his voice. “What do you mean, miss—legally dead?”

  “Perhaps I can help you, sir,” the voice came from his right.

  Lucas turned around. The woman was perhaps thirty—give or take two years. Even dressed as severely as she was, she was very attractive. Brown hair pulled back. Behind hornrimmed glasses, lovely dark eyes. Shapely. Sensible shoes.

  “I certainly hope so, Miss? . . .”

  “Mrs. Garrett-Cameron,” she corrected.

  “Of course. My name is Lucas Bowers. I am spending the summer at the Bowers plantation outside Palma, Georgia. My family is with me. I came down to see Mr. Garrett and try to clear up some legal matters concerning the estate.”

  An odd light flickered momentarily in the woman’s eyes, then was gone as quickly as it had come. For some reason he could not fathom, Lucas found the strange light more a warning signal than surprise. She said, “My grandfather handled the estate matters for years, Mr. Bowers. Then my father handled it. Since his . . . death,” she stumbled over the word, “I have handled the routine matters. Very few difficulties have been encountered with the estate. What is it you would like to discuss?”

  “Do we discuss it standing in the outer office?” Lucas asked.

  A very faint smile touched the woman’s mouth, changing it, making her appear much younger. “Forgive me, Mr. Bowers. Of course not. Please come in.” She waved toward a closed door.

  Lucas accepted her offer of coffee, then sat facing her across a desk. “Mrs. Garrett-Cameron, I don’t want to take up any more of your time than is absolutely necessary.”

  She waved that off. “This firm has handled the Bowers estate for years. Take as much time as you like.”

  “Before I start, I’m very curious about something.”

  Again she smiled, and again it softened her features. “That isn’t surprising, Mr. Bowers. You’re an attorney, aren’t you?”

  He returned the smile. “Yes. All right. The receptionist said Mr. Garrett had been declared legally dead about three years ago.”

  “Almost to the day, Mr. Bowers. In reply to your unspoken questions: He had gone up to Edmund County to make his yearly inspection of the estate. He simply vanished. Neither he nor the car he was driving was ever found. No signs of foul play—no signs of anything. He was never seen again. I was still in law school when it happened. As sometimes occurs, there was a quiet power struggle within the firm after his . . . disappearance, kidnapping, whatever it was. My father stepped in and took over. I joined the firm a year later. Two years ago, I took over after my father’s death.”

  “I see. I’m sorry about your father.”

  “He died in Edmund County.”

  Lucas lifted his eyes to meet hers. “That might make me awfully suspicious, Mrs. Garrett-Cameron.”

  “I assure you, it did just that. I went to Palma, personally. Or, rather, I went into Rome where the body was taken. I . . . could not immediately identify it positively. It had been burned very badly.”

  “Dental records?”

  “The head was missing.”

  Lucas could only sit and look at the woman.

  “My father was finally identified by a broken bone in his left foot. From an old accident.”

  “Mrs. Garrett-Cameron? . . .”

  “Anne, please.”

  “Lucas. Anne, something very odd occurred to me last week. I . . . ”

  She continued speaking as if Lucas had not uttered a word. “The team of doctors who finally helped me to identify my father said his head had been cut off with a very sharp instrument. A very heavy machete or a large-bladed axe. This was discovered in Atlanta. I don’t know the procedure, but the doctors found that a very small tattoo had been freshly placed on my father’s right arm. Up high.”

  For a moment, Lucas sagged back in his chair. He could not understand, would not even attempt to fathom what in the world was going on. He stood up, removed his jacket, and pulled up his short sleeve, exposing the fresh tattoo of the rocking horse. “Like this one, Anne?”

  * * *

  “I thought the woman was going to faint,” Lucas wrapped up the events of his Atlanta trip to Tracy. “She was really, genuinely shaken. No way that could have been an act.”

  “I will admit,” Tracy said, “I thought the law firm might have been in collusion somehow.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind, too,” Lucas admitted.

  “And she said she would be up for a weekend next month?”

  “Yes. She and her husband—I don’t know what he does for a living. I told them we had plenty of room.”

  “My old man,” Tracy said with a smile. “Still the master of understatement.”

  “Anything happen while I was gone?” Anything. . . out of the ordinary?”

  “No one approached me with a tattoo machine,” Tracy replied.

  I’m not getting through to her, Lucas thought. She isn’t—deliberately or otherwise—connecting the tattoos. To her, so far, this is all some kind of macabre joke. And, truthfully, I didn’t take it all that seriously until speaking with Anne. But now . . .

  “We got a lot accomplished this morning,” Tracy said. “I think I’ll lie down for a nap.”

  “All right,” Lucas said absently. Maybe the way to handle this is to start snooping, he thought. Try to find out if any other people have been murdered, or kidnapped, or assaulted—people who are somehow associated with this house. And I’ll have to talk with Trooper Cartier, see if he’s found any group of people who use a rocking horse for a club sign or whatever.

  “You want something to eat before I lie down?” Tracy asked.

  “No. I had a sandwich in Atlanta. Thanks, though. You go on and grab a nap. I’ll watch the kids.”

  He found them on the south veranda, sitting and watching the deserted gravel road in front of the grounds. He sat down beside them.

  “Getting bored, gang?”

  “Naw,” Johnny said.

  “It’s just kind of a lazy day,” Jackie said.

  And that triggered the memory of an old song his Grandfather Taylor used to sing. Way back when Lucas was just a boy. Something about how he might have gone fishin’, but got to thinkin’ it over.

  He could not recall the rest of the song. But the idea seemed to be a pretty good one.

  “Tell you what,” Lucas said. “How about the three of us just loafing the rest of the day? Let’s go fishing down at the creek.”

  “Yeah!” they both cried.

  “You two get the poles out of the shed. I’ll get the tackle and stuff we bought at Jim’s and then we’ll all dig some worms.”

  “Yekk!” Jackie said.

  “Maybe we’d better leave her at home,” Johnny suggested.

  Lucas laughed and stood up. “I’ll go tell Mother where we’re going.”

  “Ask her to come with us,” Jackie suggested.

  “The last time I went fishing,” Tracy said, “I got finned, I fell out of the damn boat, and stuck a hook all the way through my thumb. Do you know how my father removed the hook?”

  Lucas knew. His grandfather had done the same thing. “You push the hook through until the barb is clear, then you clip the barb off and pull the shank out.”

  “It hurts me even now. Don’t let the kids go swimming, though. That creek might be full of snakes.” She put her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes.

  “If you’re sure you don’t want to come along with us . . .”

  “I’m sure. But why don’t you take that pistol you bought from Jim along for insurance?”

  He stared at her. And he had hidden it so well—he had thought.

  She opened one eye and looked at him. “I was
looking for a screwdriver the other day and found the gun. It had to come from Jim. And Lucas—I’m taking all this very seriously.”

  “I thought you were treating it all as some sort of joke.”

  “To keep my sanity, baby. That’s all.” She rolled over and opened the nightstand on her side of the bed. She pulled out a long, very sharp butcher knife. She winked at him. “Don’t worry about Big Mamma, baby.”

  He laughed at her expression. “All right. But what changed your mind about guns?”

  “Nothing. I still hate them. But if having one makes you feel better, considering what has happened down here, I’ll try to see your side of matters.”

  He leaned over and kissed her. “Thanks. I wish we had done this several years ago.”

  She giggled and put her arms around his neck. “I don’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “They might have tattooed a baby buggy on your arm back then.” She rolled over, laughing.

  Smiling and muttering about many things, women and wives in general, Lucas walked out into the early-afternoon Georgia sunshine.

  * * *

  “What kind of pistol is that, Dad?” Johnny asked.

  “.45-caliber, son.”

  “That’s the kind Mike Hammer carries, right, Dad?”

  “The real Mike Hammer, yes.”

  “Is it hard to shoot a gun, Dad?” Jackie asked, quickly adding, “Not that I want to.”

  * * *

  His grandfather’s words returned to him, spinning out of a twenty-five-year void, reaching his mind as if they had been spoken only yesterday. “If you can point your finger, Lucas, you can shoot a pistol. Just keep this in mind: When the sights center on the target, pull the trigger. Don’t stand there trying to perfect your breathing and all that. That’ll get you mauled by an animal, snake bit, or killed by a man. Or a woman,” he had added very drily. “Whether you’re coming up with the pistol, or coming down with it, when the sights center on the target, do it. You have a natural flair for guns, boy. I hope to God you never have to use them against a man, but if you do, know how.”

  “Did you ever have to kill a man, Granddad?” Lucas had asked.

  The tall old man had been silent for a few steps as they walked across the cornfield. “Yes, boy. Back in the big war. Over in France.”

  “Did it make you sick at your stomach and all that kind of stuff?”

  “No, it didn’t, Lucas. We had a few in our company that puked up their socks a time or two. But they soon got over that—or got killed. War is a bad thing, son. But sometimes it’s a necessary thing, too. Killing a person is a bad thing, too. But sometimes that’s a necessary thing.” Again he had been silent for a few steps. “We’re going to have us a brand new man in the White House next year, Lucas. Ike is stepping down. Don’t blame him a bit. Wouldn’t want the job myself. Nixon or Kennedy will be our president. I think it’s going to be J.F.K. He’s what some folks have taken to calling a liberal.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Don’t rightly know, Lucas. Read about it in the newspaper, though. Think it means change and reform. And you’re just the right age to be caught up in all of it, boy.”

  “Should I look forward to that, Granddad?”

  “I don’t know, Lucas. I can’t answer that one.” He was silent for a few more steps, and the boy had thought his grandfather had something that was weighing very heavy on his mind. Turned out the boy was right. “Kennedy is a good man in his heart, Lucas—even if he is a Catholic. He is going to do what he thinks is right. I can’t say the same for some of them around him, but J.F.K. truly believes in what he’s saying and doing.”

  “Why are you telling me all this, Granddad?”

  “Just am. Let me think for a few hundred steps, Lucas. I got something I have to tell you; it’s hard, boy. Real hard.”

  The silence of winter had fallen around the old man and the boy as they walked across the field, dry stalks cracking and rustling and whispering under their boots. The cold winds of fall blew sharply around them, reddening the exposed skin of their faces.

  Then, in the summer’s heat of Georgia, Lucas recalled his grandfather’s words of that cold winter’s day in Vermont.

  “You’re old enough, I reckon,” the old man had said. “It’s time. But that don’t make it any easier. Your Grandmother Taylor is gone on, and the docs in the city say I don’t have all that much more time left me before I join her. That’s fine with me. I seen seventy-seven years of this old world.”

  “Time for what, Granddad?”

  “Your life is gonna rock right along pretty smooth for another few years, Lucas. But when you’re sixteen or so, you’ll have to grow up damned quick. And you’ll have to do it alone. Remember this, Lucas: All is not what is appears to be. Life ain’t no rocking horse you just get on and ride. Sometimes it’s a hard ride; sometimes you get throwed off. But you got to get right back up on that rocking horse and hang on.” He fixed the boy with a steely-eyed look, a look filled with mystery and love and wisdom. “What I’m saying, Lucas, is between you and me. Nobody else. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir, Granddad.”

  “You’re going to be the one they want, boy. They want you for their own . . . ”

  “They, Granddad? They?”

  “You’ll see, boy. All in time. I can’t prove none of what I’m saying, but I know it’s real. Be careful, Lucas. And if you have children of your own, they’ll find some way to lure you and yours to them. So be careful, Lucas. Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  Lucas hadn’t had the vaguest idea what he was promising, but he had promised he would be careful.

  Grandfather Taylor had continued then, “You’re still too young to know much about evil, Lucas. Like most, you were born with good overriding evil. I’ve looked at you and watched you carefully over the years. You’re not marked. So they’ll try to draw you to them. I’m going to tell you two more things, boy, then we’ll never speak of it again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In Georgia, walking toward the creek bank, Lucas tried to pull the old words back to him, but they would not bridge the gap.

  Then they came ripping and tearing and echoing into the man’s head.

  “Watch out for Ira and . . .

  “Stay out of Edmund County.

  “Watch out for Ira and . . .

  “Stay out of Edmund County!”

  “Are you all right, Dad?” Jackie asked.

  That brought the man clearly and cleanly back into the present.

  “Yeah, you look funny, Dad,” Johnny asked.

  “I . . . I was just thinking about things that happened a long time ago, kids. Come on!” He shook off the old words from old worlds. “Let’s go catch us a mess of fish.”

  8

  Lucas was no expert with the .45 pistol, but after a month of practice, burning up six boxes of ammo, he could hit what he was aiming at; or get close enough to the bull’s-eye to ensure that if it were a man, he would have knocked him down.

  Satisfied, he put the pistol back in leather and silently prayed he would never have to take it out again.

  And for several weeks he was torn between keeping quiet about his grandfather’s words and leveling with Tracy.

  He decided to tell her.

  “But what does it mean, Lucas?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I think my grandfather knew a hell of a lot more about . . . well, things, than he told me. And, no, I don’t know why he didn’t tell me everything he knew.”

  “Maybe he thought you were too young to cope with everything,” she said.

  “I guess that is as good an answer as any, honey.”

  The Bowers family had been in Edmund County for one month, and as Trooper Cartier had said on his last visit to sit on the on the veranda and sip iced tea with Lucas and Tracy, the radio in his car turned up to catch the calls, “It’s hard to believe what all you folks have done with this old place. It’s really coming arou
nd.”

  “We’ve got to give Lige a great deal of the credit,” Tracy said. “He works from dawn to dusk. And he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He hasn’t given you any further trouble?” Kyle asked.

  “Not a bit,” Lucas said. “And he even takes a bath every now and then.”

  “I wonder how old the man really is?” Tracy asked. “That has puzzled me for a month.”

  “Between forty and forty-five, I’d guess,” Kyle said. He sipped his iced tea. “I tried to run a make on him some time back. The man doesn’t have a past. Nothing.”

  “Jim said he came here after the army kicked him out.”

  “He was never in the army—or any other branch of service,” Kyle said. “Not under the name of Lige Manning.”

  “And that means? . . .” Tracy asked.

  “He’s probably running from something,” Kyle replied. “A wife, bad debts, trouble with the law. I was curious about him for a time. But he’s been in Edmund County for a long, long time and never been in any kind of serious trouble. He was arrested a couple of times for window peeking and once for drunkenness, but that was a long time back. He’s been clean for years. And I reckon if a man wants to change his name, that’s his business. See you folks.”

  * * *

  Lucas and Tracy had made love for what seemed to both of them like hours. It had been the most satisfying lovemaking they had shared in several years. Now both of them lay sweaty and near sleep in the big bed.

  A squall of pure terror cut through the velvet of the Georgia night. Lucas and Tracy sat up in bed, eyes wide, hearts pounding.

  “Jesus!” Lucas said. He struggled into his trousers, almost falling down in his haste. Jamming his feet into house shoes, he ran to the window and looked out.

  Behind him, Tracy screamed in horror at the sight before their eyes.

  It was Jackie. She was naked and running from half a dozen men. They were horrible-looking men, dressed in animal skins, all of them looking as though they had stepped into a time warp and been spun fifty thousand years into the future, out of the caves. Lucas almost knocked his wife down as he whirled around, running for his pistol.