Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) Read online

  “I hope so.” The man reached across the empty table between them and offered his hand. “Terry Kizer.”

  “Rob Quillen.” Kizer’s grip was soft, his hands a bit pudgy. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise.” He looked more closely. “Have we met before?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “You sure look familiar.”

  “Hey, let me ask you something,” Rob said, glad to change the subject. “Did you see anyone strange around this place last night?”

  “Strange how?”

  “Somebody sneaking around, being nosy.”

  “No. Although my wife said she thought somebody was watching her undress last night, through the window.” His eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

  Rob shook his head, which made him wince. “Never saw her before this morning.” He wondered anew if he’d imagined or dreamed the whole thing. But no, damn it, the dried mud had been there on the floor and windowsill this morning.

  “So what brings you to Needsville?” Kizer asked.

  “Oh, this and that. You guys honeymooning?”

  Kizer looked around, then said softly, “No, we just said that so we’d get the biggest room. We’re actually here to research my genealogy. It was supposed to be a fun trip, tracing my ancestors and all.”

  “And it hasn’t been?”

  Kizer chuckled ironically. “No, not a bit. But at least nobody’s hit me in the head yet.”

  “So how do you go about doing genealogical research?”

  “Mostly you prowl libraries and cemeteries. A lot’s on the Internet now, too. But I’ve hit a dead end, and I know I’ve got some family buried around here, so if I can find them and see who else is buried with them, I’ll know where to keep looking.”

  “Your wife doesn’t share your enthusiasm?”

  He aimed his eyes at the ceiling, toward his room. “You could say that. Plus most of the cemeteries are old and grown over, and you can’t even read the tombstones half the time.”

  “I saw one like that yesterday. Out behind the fire station. Seemed to be mostly the Swett family.”

  “Hey, that’s one of mine,” Kizer said, a glimmer of excitement in his eyes. “Where’d you say it was?”

  “Behind the fire station, just outside of town. If you want, I can show you where.” He had nothing else to do, and Kizer seemed like a nice guy.

  “That’d be really cool,” Kizer said appreciatively. “I need to go upstairs and grab my stuff. Meet me out front in about ten minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  Kizer used the key ring remote to unlock the doors on his SUV. The inside was littered with evidence of a long trip: wrappers, audiobooks, CDs, and odd socks. As they settled into the seats, he asked Rob, “So which way, captain?”

  “Huh?” Rob said, looking up at the second-floor windows and pondering the intruder.

  “Which direction?”

  “Oh. That way. Down Main Street.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry. Just thinking. Did you say that your wife thought someone was watching her last night?”

  “Yeah. But she generally thinks that most of the time.”

  “I imagine she’s usually right.”

  “Yeah.”

  Rob nodded at the street. “Head that way, and I’ll show you where to turn.”

  As they drove past the post office, Rockhouse was back in his usual place on the porch. The old man waved, and Rob noted the six fingers, just like the much smaller print on his windowsill.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, a bored Stella Kizer walked down Main Street, hands in the pockets of her jacket, lost in bitter thought. Her marriage, the goal she’d pursued her whole life, was disintegrating around her, and she seemed powerless to stop it. None of the fairy tales she’d loved as a child, none of the sermons preached by her minister, had prepared her for the reality of a partnership defined, it seemed, by all the things each did to annoy the other. Often she’d lie awake, watching Terry sleep and considering how he’d feel if she died … or, alternatively, how she’d feel if he did.

  Now she was stuck in the world’s most isolated and backward town—“second oldest in the state,” the frighteningly countrified woman who ran the hotel said with pride—while her husband continued his necrophilic pilgrimage. Ever since he’d discovered his family’s link with the mysterious Tufa, he’d been obsessed with tracing his lineage, as if it might somehow tell him something about himself he didn’t already know.

  That made her smile: the idea that Terry, so supremely self-absorbed, might not know something about himself. She almost laughed.

  “Life sure is funny, ain’t it?”

  She looked up. Rockhouse Hicks smiled at her from the post office porch. The sun was in her eyes, so she couldn’t see him clearly, just a vague impression of an old man in a rocking chair. “Excuse me?”

  “Especially when you get married,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “You get up there and say ‘I do,’ but they don’t tell you ‘how to,’ do they?”

  Stella shielded her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “Naw.”

  “Then … why are you talking to me?”

  “Just being neighborly. Pretty thing like you should be used to that. I bet men been neighborly to you your whole life.”

  She walked up onto the porch in order to see him more clearly. He wasn’t the first dirty old man she’d encountered; since puberty, she’d dealt with the unwanted attention of older males. When she rejected or ignored them, they often turned hostile, and she knew how to handle that as well. And today she was particularly in the mood to deal harshly with anything masculine that crossed her path.

  “Look, I’d appreciate it if you’d mind your own business. What if I were your granddaughter and some old man started coming on to her? How would you feel?”

  “Well, if she was as pretty as you, I’d at least understand it. Men have to be men.”

  She scowled. That sounded enough like a threat that it made her a bit nervous. “I’m married, too, you know.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t happy about it.”

  She folded her arms. “Now, why would you say that?”

  “I seen your husband drive off with somebody else in his truck earlier.”

  She blinked a little. They knew no one in this town; Terry had found it on a map and made reservations on the Internet. He hadn’t mentioned anyone accompanying him when he’d rushed through the room, grabbing papers. “Who?” she asked coolly.

  “Had dark hair, that’s all I could see. Lots of people around here do.”

  Stella was taken aback. Could Terry really be having an affair? Could he have met some local woman on the Internet, come here to tryst with her under the pretense of this genealogy research, and then picked these fights in order to have time alone with this new paramour? Was he that devious, that resourceful?

  “I don’t believe you,” she said at last.

  “Suit yourself,” Rockhouse said with a shrug. “But a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be alone.”

  “I think I can manage.” She turned to walk away, then froze. Standing ten feet behind her was the most handsome—no, the most beautiful—man she’d ever seen. Her stomach dropped, her mouth went dry, and her whole body seemed to surge with sensation. When he smiled, she thought she’d pass out.

  “Hey, there, little lady,” he said, and his voice made her whole body shudder. “My name’s Stoney. What’s yours?”

  12

  “So where is it?” Kizer asked.

  Rob scanned the field behind the deserted fire station. Everything was just as he remembered it, but he saw no sign of the tombstones poking above the waving grass. “It was right there,” he said in disbelief. “I swear.”

  “Maybe we’re not in the right spot to see it,” Kizer said helpfully.

  “I was standing right here yesterday and saw it,” Rob grum
bled. “Right here,” he repeated with certainty.

  “Hm. Well, It didn’t show it on any of my maps, so maybe you made a mistake.”

  “Look, I walked up to them and touched them. I read the inscriptions off them. I took pictures with my phone. I’m telling you, they’re here somewhere.”

  He marched out into the grass, toward the spot he knew the graveyard had occupied the day before. Kizer followed, a little wary now. “It really isn’t that big a deal,” he called, but Rob ignored him.

  “Goddammit,” Rob muttered as he stomped through the weeds, “it was here, I swear to God.” Yet now he saw no sign of the fence, the tall tombstones, or even a cleared space where they might have been.

  His foot slipped into a small hole. “Shit!” he cried as he fell; his head hit the ground right on the place Bliss had stitched. Pain shot through him like he’d been stabbed in the skull. “Ow! Oh, goddammit!” He curled on his side and cradled his head.

  “You okay?” Kizer asked as he rushed to him.

  Almost immediately, the pain faded to a dull ache. “Yeah, just hit the same goddam spot again.” When he gingerly touched it, he felt fresh blood. “Oh, great. Can you see if I ripped the stitches?”

  Kizer scrutinized his scalp. “No, they’re still there. Just busted the scab. It’s not bleeding much.”

  Rob blinked into the sun, which seemed brighter now, harder on his eyes. With Kizer’s help, he got to his feet and brushed the dirt off his jeans. He turned to say something, then froze.

  Behind Kizer, no more than thirty feet away, he saw the tops of the headstones above the grass. “I’ll be damned. It’s right there.”

  “Where?” Kizer said, and turned around. He couldn’t speak for a moment. “But … I mean, we just…”

  “I know, but there it is.”

  Kizer took several pictures of the cemetery’s perimeter. Then he tried the gate, which didn’t budge. “Is it locked?”

  “Just a little rusty,” Rob said. “Try it like you mean it.”

  Kizer leaned against it, and the gate protested as it swung open and allowed him to squeeze inside.

  Rob remained outside the fence, looking out at the waving grass. Under the crisp blue sky, it was postcard-beautiful, and although he had to squint into the sunlight, he felt a weird tingle inside. It was almost like he was looking at something alive, as if the rolling peaks with their wispy clouds were the curves of great, soft women reclined beside each other as far as he could see.

  A gust of wind, cold like the one that came through his window at night, blew over him. Curnen shares your song, a voice seemed to say in his head. Curnen hears your heart.

  He blinked. Where had that come from? “Did you hear something?”

  “No,” Kizer said absently.

  “Huh.” He looked around, but saw no one else.

  “I can’t read any of these,” Kizer complained, breaking the reverie.

  “What?”

  “The inscriptions. They’re too worn down to read. Which ones did you see ‘Swett’ on?”

  Rob went inside the fence and looked at the monuments. The surfaces were weathered and flat, including the ones on which he’d read the poems the previous day. “What the—?” he muttered, and knelt before one. He pressed his fingers to the now-smooth surface. “Okay, maybe I got hit in the head harder than I thought, but I swear to God, there was a readable inscription here.”

  “It’s not there now,” Kizer said.

  Rob couldn’t believe it. Plainly, the stone had not been recently altered. The barest hints of the words could be seen, but not nearly well enough to be legible. So how had he read them yesterday?

  “I can feel something here,” Rob said. “I just can’t make it out.”

  “All right, let me at it,” Kizer said. He pulled some paper and a charcoal stick from his backpack and pressed it against the stone. Working quickly, he covered the paper with broad, wide swaths of gray, against which the monument’s engraving plainly stood out. “Well, what do you know?” He moved the paper and looked behind it. “That sure did come out plain for something that’s so messed up, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Is that who you’re looking for?”

  “One of them, yeah. Thomas Swett. They called him ‘Bullman Tom’ because he once beat a bull in a tug-of-war. He’s on my mother’s side at some point, I’ll have to check when I get back to the hotel. Now I just need the rubbings off the others to get names and dates for more research.” He looked up at Rob. “Thanks, man. I know it seems kind of loony, but this means a lot. I might never have found this place without your help.”

  “Glad to do it.”

  As Kizer went to work, Rob stared at the other Swett tombstone that only yesterday had borne a plain, legible inscription. Now it, too, was unreadable.

  “That’s some weird shit, these epitaphs,” Kizer said.

  “Yeah,” Rob agreed. “Have you run up on anything like this before?”

  “No. Seems odd that somebody would take the time to chisel so many words into a rock, doesn’t it? Most people just had the name and dates, maybe a short Bible verse.”

  “Maybe the Swetts were big shots around here.”

  “Hardly.” He carefully rolled the rubbings and placed them in a tube that hung from his bag. “We’d call them white trash if they were around today, I’m afraid.”

  Rob nodded absently, his attention drawn back to the wave pattern of wind across the grass. When the breeze reached him, he felt the odd tingle again, but did not hear the strange voice.

  * * *

  Kizer dropped Rob off at the Catamount Corner. Without going inside, Rob got his car and drove out to Doyle’s gas station. Doyle’s father sat on a pillow atop two milk crates, his back against the building, reading a magazine. He looked up as Rob got out of his car.

  “Howdy,” he said. “Car still starting okay?”

  “Yeah, so far,” Rob said. “Is Doyle around?”

  “In the garage,” he said, pronouncing it “ghee-raj.”

  Rob found Doyle under the hood of a spotless black Gran Torino. The owner clearly treasured it. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Doyle said with a smile. “How’s it going?”

  “A little weird,” he said honestly. “After I left your place last night, somebody snuck into my room while I was asleep, and…” He trailed off, suddenly aware of how ludicrous he sounded. “Ah, forget it, the more I think about it, the more I figure I must’ve just been dreaming. Mainly I just wanted to see if you knew how to reach Bliss Overbay.”

  “Somebody snuck in your room?” Doyle said. “Like a burglar?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it was somebody’s kid: I found little muddy footprints all over the place. The creepy part is, I was in there asleep when it happened. And they would’ve had to have come in through a second-story window.” He didn’t mention that the handprints seemed to show six fingers; the story was already strange enough.

  “That is creepy,” Doyle agreed.

  “So do you know how to get in touch with Bliss?”

  He wiped his hands on a rag. “I might have her number around here somewhere. Mind if I ask why?”

  “I don’t know. Mind if I ask why you want to ask why?”

  “The folks around here—the hard-core pure-blood Tufas—have their own way of doing things. And they’re like a tribe, with important people at the top. Bliss is one of those important people.”

  “Important how?”

  “It’s complicated, and there’s a lot I don’t know. But I’ve heard people say that among the Tufa women, she’s the second-highest authority. There’s not much business in Needsville, so I can’t afford to alienate anybody by being indiscreet. Especially someone with any sort of influence.”

  “I want her to take a look at the stitches she put in. I fell down this morning, and I might’ve torn ’em loose.” Since that wasn’t technically a lie, Rob had no problem meeting Doyle’s eyes when he said it. But he mainly wanted to talk to her about
what had happened at the graveyard.

  The mechanic thought hard. “Well … okay.” Rob followed him into the office, where Doyle wrote the number on a Post-it note. “Better tell her you got it from me, though.”

  “Why? If I don’t, will she wave her hands at me?” He wiggled his fingers, intending to be funny.

  Doyle turned red, although his voice stayed even. Rob couldn’t tell if he was angry or embarrassed. “No, but she might not talk to you if she thinks you got her number some underhanded way, like off the Internet or something.”

  “Sorry, it was a bad joke. But seriously, what is all that hand-waving stuff? Is it religious or something?”

  “When you were a kid, did you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s kind of like that. We were all raised being told that some silly stuff was true. And even though we’re all grown up and know better, it’s settled in our heads so well that we still act like it’s true sometimes.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  He shrugged. “Best I can do.” He went back into the garage, picked up a socket handle, and stuck his head back under the Torino’s hood.

  “Well, thanks for the number,” Rob called after him, worried that he’d alienated his only real friend here.

  As Rob drove away, he swore he saw Doyle on the phone in the office, talking earnestly with someone. It was a momentary glimpse, really no more than an impression, and he knew that thinking Doyle was calling to warn Bliss had to be a reflection of his own paranoia. Didn’t it?

  13

  When Rob returned to the Catamount Corner, a Tennessee State Trooper’s car was parked next to Terry Kizer’s SUV. As he got out, the young officer appeared from inside and came down the steps toward him. He had the Tufa hair and skin. “Are you Mr. Robert Quillen?” he asked in that flat, emotionless policeman’s way.

  Rob’s first thought was that he was being arrested and would be forced back on the TV show. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Trooper Alvin Darwin. I need to talk to you in an official capacity, Mr. Quillen. Might have a missing-persons case on our hands, and you might be a witness.”