Chapter Seventeen
Provo lay in darkness when Michael stopped the truck at the train station.
Hiram hopped down from the truck bed prepared to encourage Adelaide Tunstall, and offer to keep driving. He found her laughing and shaking her head.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tunstall,” he said, unable to stop himself from launching into the beginning of a rehearsed speech, “but there is evil in the world.”
She laughed and slapped his shoulder. “And there are silly, silly people, too!”
Was she drunk?
Michael stood up with his feet inside the cab, elbows spread wide on the truck’s roof. “I was telling her about my friend Porky Mullins.” Michael’s face was twitching.
“I don’t…I don’t remember Porky.”
Michael snorted. “Well, he remembers you! Porky is the one who got out of his mind on reefer and got into our barn?”
Hiram couldn’t for the life of him remember the incident. “Yeah?”
“And he was convinced he could get one of our roosters to fertilize our nanny goat, so he kept standing birds up on that old goat’s back, and every time he did, she complained louder, until finally you woke up and came out to the barn in your pajamas.”
Hiram raised his fedora to let the cool night air dry the sweat on his skull and allow Michael to finish telling the story.
“He tried to explain what he was doing. And you said to Porky, ‘Son, you got two basic problems here. One is that you’re an idiot.’ And Porky said, ‘I’m not an idiot, I’m stoned.’ And you said, ‘Two is that those birds are all hens.’”
Mrs. Tunstall laughed so hard she had to gasp for breath. “Thank you both,” she said when she had recovered. “Thank you for the ride, and I’m sorry some of those maniac debauchees of Helper tried to jump us. I hope the truck is all right.”
“The truck is fine.” Hiram untied Guy and helped him down. Would he tell his wife what he’d seen? What had he seen?
But Guy gave no indication he would say anything, and only hugged his wife, muttering, “Uh, yep. Yep. Thank you. Thank you.”
“You okay with us leaving you?” Michael asked Adelaide.
“I admit I was frightened.” The woman fanned her face. “But I don’t think a man’s going to run all the way across the mountains barefoot, even if he is smoking reefer.”
“Probably true.” Hiram untied the luggage and he and Michael unloaded it. The train schedule, tacked to the wooden wall of a little shelter squatting on the platform, showed the first departure at dawn, which was about three hours away. “You have money for the fare?”
Adelaide Tunstall nodded, then sighed. “Not as much as I’d hoped, but Dad did have a little spare cash in the cabin, and I collected that. And there’s the five hundred dollars I showed you.”
So she had gone to the cabin looking for the money.
He wished she had found it. The presence of a pile of money could only complicate his efforts to solve Lloyd Preece’s murder.
“What if the money shows up later?” he asked.
“I’ll reach out to my father’s lawyer,” she said. “I know the address. There’s land, in any case, and I’m the only heir, so he’s going to have to sell that for me. If that falls through?” She shrugged. “My father said there’s a fortune to be had in a man’s good opinion of himself. I’ll have that at least.”
Adelaide Tunstall was going to be fine. Hiram felt the muscles of his back relax.
“We can stay until the train comes, if you like,” Michael offered.
“You men get on to what you have to do,” Adelaide said. “We’ll catch the first train and be gone.”
Hiram and Michael made a show of driving up the road north, but then, at Hiram’s direction, Michael circled back. They parked out of sight, and then sat in a small grove of plum trees beside a burbling irrigation ditch, to watch the Tunstalls.
Just in case.
“This Porky Mullins sounds like a bad influence,” Hiram said.
“There is no Porky Mullins.”
Hiram felt like a fool. “Then why…why did you make the story up?”
“I winked at you.”
“I missed it.”
“I needed to comfort her,” Michael said. “It’s better if she thinks we ran into some kind of crazy gang of drug addicts than for us to explain what was really attacking us. I guess that’s part of the job, isn’t it, Pap? People who know about you come to you for help. People who don’t know about you, and what you can do…part of the job is to keep them ignorant. Of the darker, nastier things that are out there.”
Hiram shrugged. “Really, I just don’t like that certain look people give me when they think I’m a nut. So I try to stay quiet.”
“So who were those naked guys, really? I hear Europeans like to run around naked all the time. Is there a chance that maybe they really were just some Dutchmen who got a little reefer into them and went wild?”
So Michael hadn’t seen the men change shape. How much should he tell his son?
Hiram put a hard brake on his old instinct. Michael was learning the craft and should know the risks.
“Did you see the deer-men?” he asked his son.
“I saw a deer,” Michael said. “Big as an elk, and I didn’t get a good look at him. I figured the naked guys must have disturbed him.”
“The naked men became the deer,” Hiram said. “Only they weren’t deer, they were deer-monsters. They ran on their hind legs, and their faces looked part-man.”
“Holy shit,” Michael said. “Are you ser…no, of course you are. You don’t joke about this kind of thing.”
Hiram let the cursing go without comment. “I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve seen men who worshipped animals before, and acted like animals, and dressed like animals to commit evil, violent acts, but this one is a first for me.”
“I heard a lot of gunshots. Just tell me the deer-men didn’t have rifles.”
“I was the one shooting. And I hit them, but I don’t think I hurt any of them. The bullets just seemed to knock them down.”
“Can I say holy shit again?”
“You’ve said it enough.”
They sat awhile in silence. Hiram felt faint. Above the mountains to the east, the sky began to bleach from its midnight indigo shade to a pale blue. Hiram found his thoughts drifting to Diana Artemis. He tried to ask himself hard questions about what she knew and what she was up to, but he kept imagining instead her throat and bosom as she leaned into the cab of his truck—
“Pap, are you wounded?” Michael asked.
Hiram touched his shoulder, and his arm. The slashes from the antlers were still bleeding.
No wonder he felt faint. And that meant that the bloodstone wasn’t working; it was supposed to stanch the flow of blood from a wound.
A chaste and sober mind. He needed to recover his self-control. Hiram pinched himself.
“Yes,” he said. The train was slowly arriving at the platform, and other people were beginning to appear there. “The deer-things got me. It’s Sunday, or we could go to a pharmacy.”
“I’ll drive you home,” Michael said. “We’re not far. We can patch up your wounds, and you better believe we’re bringing another gun back with us.”
“I don’t know whether that’s wise.”
“I don’t know whether I care,” Michael said. “You got smashed by a were-deer, Pap. And I had one of them jumping on the hood of the truck. If I had a gun, I could have shot him. And even if the bullets didn’t break his skin, or whatever, it might have knocked him off.”
Hiram took a deep breath.
“If today were Monday,” Michael said, “I’d stop at a bicycle shop and buy a revolver. Since it’s not, I’ll settle for us bringing the shotgun and the rifle back to Moab with us.”
“Back to Moab?”
“Yeah, Pap. Were-deer or not, we haven’t solved the murder. We haven’t even figured out the ghost, and I thought that was going to be the easy one.”
The Tunstalls boarded the train. Hiram had deliberately not asked where they were going, but he hoped it was somewhere peaceful.
“Get in the truck, Pap,” Michael said. “Bandages, breakfast, guns, and then one more thing before we head back.”
“Church?” Hiram suggested.
“Nope,” Michael said. “We have to see Mahonri.”
* * *
It was nearly noon by the time they had bathed, bandaged Hiram’s wounds—which finally stopped bleeding only when they were packed with gauze—eaten, slept a little, loaded the bolt-action rifle and the break-open double-barreled shotgun into the truck, along with ammunition for both, and driven back to Provo to the little chapel on 700 North where Mahonri Young attended church. Mahonri himself was one of the last people to slowly stream out when services ended.
When Mahonri saw Hiram and Michael, he smiled.
Mahonri had his great-grandfather’s (or was it great-great-grandfather’s?) face, the set jaw and the rugged beard along the jawline only that had made people call Brigham Young the Lion of the Lord. Mahonri looked nothing like the stone sculptures or severe oil paintings from the 1850s, though—he was animated, and the moment he saw Hiram and Michael, he leaped forward, necktie flapping back over his shoulder like a scarf.
“Wonderful!” he cried. “Jolinda has baked a cherry pie, and we’ve had beef simmering in the pot all morning. Come eat with us!”
He gripped Hiram by the elbow and steered him toward Mahonri’s house, a blue-gray adobe brick manor large enough to accommodate the Young family’s seven children.
“Ooh,” Michael said. “Pie!”
Hiram resisted. “Jolinda is a generous and hospitable woman, but I wouldn’t spring myself on her with so little notice.”
Mahonri’s face fell. “Oh, no. You’re here with questions.”
“It’s not me.” Hiram jerked a thumb at Michael. “He wants something.”
Mahonri’s face brightened. “Oh good, a science question.” He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “What are you looking for, Michael? I’ve got the keys to the library and I can get us in this afternoon. I’ll check out the book in my own name, so you have a whole year to return it.”
“Good.” Michael grinned, but there was a bashful note in his smile. “I’m looking for a book on astrology.”
Mahonri frowned. “Astronomy?”
“No, you heard me right. Astrology. But not fortune-telling. I need the gnarly old stuff about talisman-making. How do I…how does one…make a talisman to capture the influence of Jupiter, for instance?”
“Your father has a ring.” Mahonri’s face darkened. “Maybe he can help you.”
“He says Grandma Hettie just showed him the pattern. And besides, if it wasn’t over his head, we wouldn’t both be standing here.”
Mahonri shook his head, looking down at polished black wing-tip shoes.
“If it helps,” Michael said, “we’re trying to solve a murder.”
“How does that help?” Mahonri asked. “How does it improve the situation to know that you’re doing something dangerous, and probably illegal, since you’re doing the job of the police department?”
Michael touched Mahonri’s shoulder. “Because we’re helping someone who needs aid. Like you do, all the time. Like you’ve helped me, for years and years.”
Tears formed in the corners of Mahonri’s eyes, but he nodded. “Meet me at the library in twenty minutes.”
“You can eat first,” Hiram suggested.
Mahonri shook his head. “Pie can wait.”
* * *
“Can deer get psoriasis?” Hiram asked.
Mahonri was unlocking a small side door to Brigham Young High School, a towering gothic complex that looked wholly out of place surrounded by tidy brick bungalows and fruit trees. “I don’t know. You have sick deer around the farm, you’re worried they might pass it to the cattle?”
A lie would have been the easiest, but Hiram resisted. “No, it’s something I saw driving up here last night. What would cause a deer to get scabby, scaly skin?”
Mahonri shrugged. “You know more about animals than I do, but let me show Michael the books I have, and then I’ll see what I can find for you.”
They trudged up to Mahonri’s office, in a tower above the library. A different key unlocked that, and then a third key unlocked a black wooden cabinet in the corner of the room, revealing three shelves of books. Their spines were all old and made of leather, and many of them didn’t have visible titles at all. Hiram saw some titles but could read almost none of them, since they were in Latin, or in different alphabets entirely. He did recognize The Discoverie of Witchcraft and Picatrix, and at least he could read the title New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences.
“Is this some kind of personal collection?” Michael asked.
Mahonri laughed. “Heavens, no. Well…sort of. These books belong to the library, but if I left them on the shelves, they’d be vandalized or destroyed.”
“By students?” Hiram asked.
“Or faculty. Or administrators.” Mahonri grabbed a volume with no title and looked at the frontispiece. “Here, I think this may have what you want.”
“Star-Lore,” Michael read, “Their Signs and Influence. Can I take it with me?”
Mahonri hesitated. “Yes. But first, why don’t you sit here and read it for a bit while I take your father to look for his answer?”
The two men walked to the stacks. Mahonri was grinding his teeth and marching in a straight line, and in two minutes he had located a volume called Skin Ailments of Cervidae.
“I’ll check it out to you,” Mahonri said. “Don’t worry about the paperwork.”
“You’re angry,” Hiram said.
“You’re involving Michael in the…occult…side of what you do.”
“He involved himself,” Hiram said. “He wants to know.”
“He should be a scientist,” Mahonri insisted. “Not a hedge-wizard.”
That stung a little, but it wasn’t false. Hiram nodded. “I think he’ll lose interest in what I do. Farming? Performing traditional cures for hog sicknesses?”
“That isn’t what you do.” Mahonri jabbed a finger into Hiram’s chest. “You solve murders.”
Hiram nodded. “I will…encourage him to take up science. I already do. I’ll keep doing it.”
Mahonri nodded fiercely. “See that you do. You and I are friends, Hiram, but if that boy ends up hurt because of you, I will see you in hell.”
Hiram hung his head. “If Michael ends up hurt because of me, I will be in hell.”
* * *
On the drive back to Moab, Michael spouted what he had learned.
“Okay, Pap, I’m going to start with astronomy, but I’m not talking telescopes. I mean the stars from the point of view of someone standing on the earth, in the northern hemisphere.”
“That’s the only point of view I have.”
Michael nodded. “So, there’s a kind of circular track around the earth, like an equator in the sky, only it’s not the equator, it intersects the celestial equator at two points, but it’s a different band. And it’s called the ecliptic.”
“The zodiac is the twelve constellations on the ecliptic,” Hiram said. “And the visible planets and the sun and moon, from our perspective, all move along the ecliptic.”
“Very good, Pap. They move along it like a road. So the sun and the moon and the five visible planets are always in one of the constellations of the zodiac.”
Hiram winked. He was feeling better, though it took some effort. Mahonri’s words had cut him.
Michael continued. “So a planet—Jupiter, for instance—is always in one of the constellations of the zodiac. Meaning, when you look at that constellation, there’s Jupiter visible inside it.”
“It’s in Scorpio right now,” Hiram said. “I saw it last night, driving to Helper.”
“Huh,” Michael said. “Okay. Anyway, astral talismans are all about using objects to channel the power of the stars and planets for people to use. The stars and the planets have written symbols, and are also associated with metals, and gemstones, and colors, and days of the week, and all that stuff. You line up as many influences as you can when you’re trying to draw on the strength of one of the planets.”
“The ring Mahonri was talking about is my Saturn ring,” Hiram said. “It’s an example of what you’re saying. It helps me channel the power of Saturn to have and understand prophetic dreams.”
Michael nodded. “A talisman designed to harness the power of Jupiter and give it to a person would be made of silver, because that’s a Jupiterian metal. Or actually, what they call it, and this is a great word, is Jovial. Of Jove, which is another name for Jupiter. Silver is a Jovial metal. It would be marked with the sign of Jupiter, and it would also be marked with a sign for that person.”
“I’ve figured this one out. You mean the sign that Jupiter was in on the day he was born. The whole year of his birth, basically.”
“Right. But not a calendar year, a year determined by the movement of Jupiter. And sometimes Jupiter moves backward for a little while, which complicates things, because it can actually move backward into the sign it has just left.”
Hiram tried to wrap his mind around this and found the ideas slippery. “Tell me what the significance of this is?”
Michael was quiet for a moment. “Gudmundson and Preece both had silver knives, but they were not quite the same.” He looked away briefly and cleared his throat. “I…I would like to be able to see and compare them, but I think the difference between them is that Gudmundson’s knife had the sign of the zodiac constellation that Jupiter was in when he was born, and Preece’s had the zodiac sign that held Jupiter at his birth. Aquarius and Taurus. And really, these talismans are most effective if they are made by the individual who will use them, or with that person’s active cooperation, so…I don’t know about that whole curio shop story.”
“Channeling Jupiter, huh?” Hiram sucked at his teeth. “To what end?”
Michael thought awhile and finally shrugged. “Power and prosperity, somehow.”
Hiram nodded.
“And Pap,” Michael said. “The widow Artemis, too…she’s full of beans, on one point at least.”
Hiram felt a chill in his spine. “What’s that?”
“The planet Uranus doesn’t govern a toenail, Pap. It governs nothing. The old astrologers had never heard of the planet Uranus, because it’s not visible to the naked eye. Which means that Uranus cross of hers, at the very least—”
“Is mumbo jumbo.” Hiram’s heart sank.
“Good thing I’m driving. You look like you might faint.”
“That may answer one question, anyway,” Hiram continued. “If Lloyd Preece was…uh, seeing…Diana Artemis, why wouldn’t he give her the job of dowsing Rex Whittle’s well?”
Michael nodded. “Because he knew she was a fake.”