Ghost Towns Read online

  “And I can’t say I care much for your one new neighbor, from what we’ve seen of him,” I said. “I don’t guess you’d be too happy should he come a-callin’.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Eileen replied, her voice, like her father’s, honeyed with just a drop of brogue. “We’re grateful for whatever company we get.”

  “Very grateful,” her sister added, mooning at Old Red.

  My brother felt the sudden need to re-butter his hotcakes.

  “Lonely or not,” Kennedy said sternly, going stiff-backed in his chair, “we won’t abandon our land. Not to the Mormons, we won’t.”

  Old Red peeked up from his pancakes.

  “And not to a monster?”

  “Ah! That’s all the more reason to stay.” Kennedy leaned forward toward my brother. “I’m going to catch the rascal!”

  That was enough to slow even my chewing.

  “You aim to catch a ‘Water Indian’?”

  “Why not? Whatever it really is, it’s solid enough—you’ve seen the tracks. Why shouldn’t a trap catch it the same as any other animal? And Mr. Barnum…he’d pay thousands for such a thing, wouldn’t he?”

  “Maybe he would’ve,” I said. “But ol’ P.T.’s been dead goin’ on two years now.”

  “Oh. Well.” Kennedy shrugged. “Some other huckster, then. It hardly matters who. Get your hands on a living, breathing monster, and the showmen’ll line up for the chance to buy him. We’ll be rich.”

  I tried for another sneaky peep at the women to see what they thought of their father’s beast-wrangling scheme. But they were ready for me this time with faces as blank as a fresh-wiped chalkboard.

  “Of course, it’s not easy without any help.” Kennedy slumped and shook his head. “It’s hard enough to manage the farming, just me and the girls. There’s not much time for tracking or trapping. Still, I’ve come close to catching the big devil. More than once, I have. And one day…”

  Kennedy slapped a palm on the table.

  “But look at me!” he boomed, suddenly jolly. “Keeping guests from their feed with all my blather. Eat up, boys! Eat up! Then, when you’re done, I’d like to show you around the place, if I may.”

  Right on cue, Fiona and Eileen hustled over to re-heap our plates with steaming-hot grub, and when my brother and I stood up fifteen minutes later, my belly sagged out over my belt like an overfilled sandbag. Yet somehow I found the strength to drag my newfound girth around after Kennedy as he gave us a tour of his spread.

  He had plenty to be proud of there: acres of wheat, garden vegetables growing in neat rows, a small but hearty assortment of livestock. And the pens, the barn, the water pump—all of it in good repair.

  I was amazed one old man and two women could manage so well on their own. But then I learned of the toll it took, and it seemed to make a little more sense.

  Behind the barn, in the midst of a small stand of firs, was a single grave marker. Kennedy noticed us eyeing it as he led us past.

  “My wife,” he said.

  Old Red moved closer to the lonely little family plot. Kennedy and I followed him.

  When we reached the cool shade of the trees, we all stopped and doffed our hats.

  “A good woman,” Kennedy said. “Been gone many a year now.”

  But not as many as I would’ve thought. Carved into the dark, knotty old wood were these words, which I read aloud for my brother’s benefit:

  ABIGAIL KENNEDY

  BELOVED WIFE & MOTHER

  DECEMBER 1, 1847—MARCH 15, 1875

  Which meant Eileen wasn’t three or four years my elder, as I’d reckoned. If her mother died birthing her, she was three years younger than me. Pretty though she still was, at the rate she was going she’d be a bent-backed, snaggle-toothed crone by the time she hit thirty.

  The Kennedys may have been surviving as a trio, but to thrive they’d need to be a quartet or quintet, at least. If the Water Indian didn’t kill them, the drudgery would.

  Well, the only decent thing to do was help out in whatever way we could. It was Old Red who volunteered us, actually, though I’d been just about to do so myself. Kennedy tried to look surprised, but it was plain he’d been hoping all along we’d offer to take on some chores. “No need for that” gave way to “You could nut a couple bull calves for me” in two seconds flat.

  The rest of the day passed as so many once had for me and my brother. Collecting prairie oysters, milking cows, slopping hogs, chopping wood—it was our childhood all over again, right down to the womenfolk. Instead of our dear Mutter and sisters toiling away beside us, though, it was Eileen and Fiona. Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, they were somewhere nearby, chattering, singing songs, bringing us cool water and warm smiles.

  Hard though the work was, it felt comfortable. Right. Seductive, you might even call it. I’d thought farming was about the last thing I ever wanted to do—all sodbusting ever brought our family was aches, pains, and early graves. But the Kennedys did their best to make it seem pleasant.

  And pleasant it was except for the flutter in my stomach, the itch at the back of my scalp, the creepy-crawly feeling that kept pulling my gaze to the woods.

  Something’s out there.

  The thought stayed stuck in my mind like a bit of gristle in your teeth you keep worrying with your tongue.

  Yet Old Red didn’t seem edgy in the least. Even more unlike him, he appeared to be enjoying himself, hotfooting from chore to chore with such cheerful obliviousness I almost expected him to start skipping and whistling. Knowing my brother as you do, you might doubt me more on this than on my sighting of the lake creature, but I swear I saw it with my own eyes. At one point, he approached Fiona—not just voluntarily, but smiling—and offered to help her hang out the washing.

  Soon after that, Kennedy invited us to stay the night. It was an offer we all knew was coming, as the sun was practically down in the treetops, and the shadows from the forest were stretching out ever longer and darker. My brother and I had already brought our horses over to be watered and fed, so there was nothing to it but to say yes.

  Kennedy seemed pleased—ecstatic, almost—and he immediately set his daughters to cooking up a regular feast. When us men came in at dusk, we found the kitchen table laden with baked ham, mashed yams, green beans in butter, and fresh bread.

  I felt a mite guilty about the sumptuousness of it all, these being folks who probably made do with vegetable stew and squirrel meat, most nights. Yet declining such hospitality would be a grievous insult, I told myself. Good manners dictated—nay, demanded—that I stuff myself like (and with) a pig. Which I did my utmost to do.

  Yet my utmost, for once, wasn’t up to the task. My stomach was already full…of butterflies. A whole swarm of them, it felt like, all of them a-flapping and a-fluttering and generally giving me the collywobbles. What I did get down my gullet, I barely tasted.

  “You don’t like the food?” Eileen asked me from across the table.

  I looked up—realizing only then that I’d been staring out the window—and found her pouting at me prettily.

  “Like it? Nope.” I popped a forkful of ham into my mouth. “I love it! Why, with you two here to work the stove for him, it’s a wonder your pa don’t weigh a thousand pounds.”

  “I’m getting close!” Kennedy chortled, and he leaned back in his chair and gave his big belly a playful pat.

  “So I noticed,” my brother shot back with (for him) uncommon impishness. He’d just been picking at his vittles, like me, though for him this was the norm. Most days, Old Red doesn’t eat enough to put fat on a consumptive flea.

  “You’re one to talk!” Kennedy joshed him. “You look like you’re about to dry up and blow away. What you need is a good woman cooking for you like this every day.”

  Fiona was seated next to him, across from my brother, and she turned and gave the old man a swat on the arm.

  “Dad….”

  She peeked over at Old Red and batted her eyes.


  “I’m just saying,” her father went on, “our friends here should settle down. Drifting from town to town, job to job—that’s all well and good for a young buck, but a man needs more. Sooner or later, you have to put down roots.”

  “We used to have roots,” I said. “Then the whole danged family tree up and died on us.”

  “We’ll put us down some new roots one day,” Old Red added, looking at me—almost making me a promise, it seemed. He shifted his gaze back to Kennedy and Fiona. “But the thing about roots is, they don’t just hold you steady. They hold you still. Almost like—”

  Chains, I think he was about to say. He amended himself at the last second, though.

  “…an anchor.”

  “Ahhh, but there’s nothing wrong with dropping anchor when you’ve found calm waters,” Kennedy said. “Stormy seas, my younger days were. Up here I finally found safe harbor.”

  “Safe harbor? With your Mormon troubles and your…”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “monster,” so I jerked my head at the door—and the blackness beyond it.

  “…exotic wildlife.”

  Kennedy chuckled in a dismissive sort of way.

  “Oh, well, as much as I might complain about the Brethren, the worst of those troubles is long past. And as for the Water Indian, whatever it is, it’s never harmed anyone. It’s frightening, yes. But dangerous? That I haven’t seen.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” I said.

  “Not for everything,” Kennedy replied. “Not if I can’t catch the thing. Then there’s no way to know what it’s really like…or what it’s really worth.” The old man cocked his head to one side, his eyes flashing so fiery bright it’s a wonder his puffy white eyebrows didn’t burst into flame. “But if I were to have some help…”

  I couldn’t stop myself—I jumped. Not that the old man’s words were so shocking. It was the dainty foot stroking my calf under the table that startled me.

  “Something the matter?” Eileen asked, all dewy-eyed innocence even as her foot snaked its way up toward my thigh.

  I blocked her with clenched knees. Flirting’s all well and good, but even I’m not dumb enough to let a gal toe-tease me when her father’s five feet away and a shotgun’s nine.

  “’Scuse me.” I gave my chest a little thump. “Hic-cups.”

  And then I jumped again—as did everyone else.

  Outside, twigs were snapping, branches creaking, leaves shushing.

  Inside, I was quivering.

  “Set out another plate, Eileen,” Kennedy said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “We’ve got more company.”

  Eileen didn’t move.

  “All we have to do is wait,” her sister said, voice a-tremor. “It’ll go away eventually.”

  “We’ll be fine as long as we stay inside,” Eileen added, so straight and stiff in her chair she could’ve been carved out of wood herself. “In the light.”

  “That’s right. The nighttime’s his,” Kennedy said. “But we can track him tomorrow, when the sun’s out. With three of us to look, maybe we could finally find his lair. And once we’ve got that, we’ve got him.”

  “Oh, please,” Old Red snapped. “That’s bunk, and you know it.”

  The old man, Fiona, Eileen, me—we all gaped at him.

  “Excuse me?” Kennedy said.

  “You’re really just scared to face that thing, ain’t you?” my brother sneered at him. “Well, I’m not. Now’s our chance, and I’m gonna take it.”

  Old Red pushed his chair back from the table and came to his feet, his expression a scowling jumble of fear and anger and defiance. There was a wildness in his eyes I’d never seen before. In any other man, I would’ve called it bloodlust.

  He stomped to the nearest window and peered out through glass so black it could’ve been a mirror dipped in pitch.

  “‘His lair’? ‘His lair’?” Old Red barked out an incredulous laugh. “His lair’s at the bottom of the damned lake. Ain’t no way we could ever…a-ha!”

  He jabbed a finger at the window. Even from my spot at the table, I could see what he was pointing at: twin pinpricks of light glowing in the darkness high in the trees outside.

  Old Red whirled around to face us.

  “I don’t care what kinda critter that is,” he growled—and he marched over and snatched up Kennedy’s scattergun. “Two barrels in the gut’ll kill it quick enough.”

  “No, no, no,” the old man spluttered. “We need it alive, remember? To sell.”

  “I think we oughta listen to the man, Brother,” I said.

  But Old Red was already striding off again.

  “Can’t sell it if we never catch it,” he said without looking back. “And a body’ll fetch a pretty penny too.”

  He threw open the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

  Kennedy hurled himself from his chair and stumbled after him.

  “Noooooo!” he howled.

  Old Red took aim.

  Fiona and Eileen screamed.

  Out in the darkness, the lights dropped downward, then disappeared.

  Old Red pulled the triggers, and the shotgun spat fire into the night…but not where the lights had been. At the last second, my brother had jerked the shotgun up, spraying buckshot at the stars.

  When my ears stopped ringing, I heard a new sound: whimpering. From the women and from somewhere out in the forest too.

  “Mr. Kennedy,” Old Red said coolly, all trace of his killing frenzy suddenly gone, “why don’t you tell your boy to stop playin’ games and come on inside?”

  “My…boy…?”

  “Your son, sir.” Old Red turned back toward the woods. “And bring them special moccasins of yours with you! And your rig for the candles! Y’all owe us a look at ’em, I’d say!”

  And with that, he handed Kennedy the shotgun, sauntered inside, and retook his seat at the table.

  “That was a cruel thing to do!” Eileen spat at him.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Did he frighten you?” I shot back, matching her venom with acid. “Not a pleasant sensation, is it?”

  I still didn’t know all the hows and whys, but the what was plain enough. The clan Kennedy had taken my brother and me for fools. And, alas, they’d been half right.

  Fiona and Eileen glowered back at me, sullen and silent.

  “Keeley! Keeley, boy! Are you all right?” the old man called out from the porch.

  A sniffling “I’m fine” drifted from the darkness of the trees, and then the Water Indian himself emerged from the shadows—a slender, slouching teenage boy. As he and his father shuffled inside, I saw that the kid was carrying a length of rope. Tied to it was a wooden rod sporting a snuffed candle on each end.

  “Take those ridiculous things off,” Fiona muttered at the boy. She waved a hand at his feet, which were encased it what looked like Goliath’s furry bed slippers. “You’re not going to track mud all over my clean floor.”

  Keeley nodded glumly, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and shuffled back out to the porch.

  “Make those yourself?” Old Red asked as the kid kicked off “those ridiculous things.”

  “Yes sir,” the boy said, managing a sad little smile. He held up his fuzzy fake feet, both embarrassed and proud. “Bear paws and rawhide.”

  “Neat bit of workmanship—you might have a future as a cobbler,” I told him. “Providin’ your career as a confidence man don’t pan out.”

  The boy slinked over to the table and took the last empty seat—the one to my left, at the head of the table opposite his father. The rope and rod he put on the table next to the ham.

  “Well, isn’t this cozy?” I said. “Y’all got any more kin out scarin’ the bejesus out of strangers? Cuz if you do, may as well bring ’em on in. There’s still plenty of eats to go around.”

  “We’re sorry, all right?” Eileen snapped. She pointed dagger-eyes at her father. “It wasn’t our idea.”

  The old man had slumped into his s
eat so limp he could’ve been a scarecrow stuffed with pudding. But his daughter’s spiteful tone brought him up ramrod straight, and he met her glare head on.

  Eileen’s backbone slowly lost its starch until at last she was the one hunched in her chair looking wilted. It was as if her father’s gaze had sucked the life right out of her.

  Kennedy turned to my brother.

  “Tell me. How did you know?”

  “Well, sir…usually I make it a point not to have any prejudices and to just let the facts lead me where they will,” Old Red said, paraphrasing a line from You Know Who’s latest adventure in Harper’s Weekly. (“The Reigate Puzzle,” should you care to look it up.) “But it turns out I’ve got me one prejudice I can’t shake. I don’t believe in spooks and monsters. So that’s what’s been leadin’ me today.”

  My brother looked at the other end of the table, at the boy.

  “Led me to notice how them tracks of yours just happened to go in and out of the lake next to a big ol’ log—which somebody could use to climb out of the water without leaving more footprints on the shore. And led me to notice a notch in a broken tree limb where the ‘Water Indian’ had been skulkin’ around.” He nodded at the rope coiled up on the table. “The kinda notch that might make if it was thrown over and used to shake the branches way up high. Or to dangle something up there. A couple candle ‘eyes,’ let’s say.”

  The boy nodded, looking awestruck. Old Red hadn’t shot wide of the target once.

  My brother turned back to the old man.

  “Course, it didn’t have to be y’all playin’ bogeyman. At first, I thought it might be someone tryin’ to scare you off—some of ‘the Brethren’ hopin’ to clear out Kennedyville for good. But when you run on ahead this morning to tell your family we was comin’? Seemed like a good time to cook up some flimflam. And when you told us your wife died birthing your youngest…and then the gravestone said she passed in 1875?”

  Old Red threw Eileen a quick there-and-gone glance.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but there just ain’t no way you’re eighteen.”

  Eileen perked up just enough to shoot him a hateful scowl.

  “So I volunteered to help you hang out the washin’,” my brother went on, turning to Fiona. “Pinned up some shirts and britches a big, bluff man like your father’d bust at the seams. Looked like clothes for a smaller feller. Younger, maybe. Like eighteen, perhaps.”