Otherworldly Maine by Noreen Doyle Read Free Book Online Page A

.”
    Mike Short picked me up at the Lohman bus station, and told me something of a ferment in Darkfield. I shouldn’t have been surprised. “They’re all scared, Mr. Dane. They want to hurt somebody.” Mike is Jim Short’s younger brother. He scrapes up a living with his taxi service and occasional odd jobs at the garage. There’s a droop in his shaggy ringlets, and I believe thirty is staring him in the face. “Like old Harp he wants to tell it like it happened and nobody buys. That’s sad, man. You been away what, three days? The fuzz was pissed off. You better connect with Mister Sheriff Robart like soon. He climbed all over my ass just for driving you to the bus that day, like I should’ve known you shouldn’t.”
    â€œI’ll pacify him. They haven’t found Mrs. Ryder?”
    Mike spat out the car window, which was rolled down for the mild air. “Old Harp he never got such a job of snow-shoveling done in all his days. By the c’munity, for free. No, they won’t find her.” In that there was plenty of I-want-to-be-asked, and something more, a hint of the mythology of Mike’s generation.
    â€œSo what’s your opinion, Mike?”
    He maneuvered a fresh cigarette against the stub of the last and drove on through tiresome silence. The road was winding between ridged mountains of plowed, rotting snow. I had the window down on my side, too, for the genial afternoon sun, and imagined a tang of spring. At last Mike said, “You prob’ly don’t go along . . . Jim got your ca’ out, by the way. It’s at your place . . . Well, you’ll hear ’em talking it all to pieces. Some claim Harp’s telling the truth. Some say he killed her himself. They don’t say how he made her disappear. Ain’t heard any talk against you, Mr. Dane, nothing that counts. The sheriff’s peeved, but that’s just on account you took off without asking.” His vague, large eyes watched the melting landscape, the ambiguous messages of spring. “Well, I think, like, a demon took her, Mr. Dane. She was one of his own, see? You got to remember, I knew that chick. Okay, you can say it ain’t scientific, only there is a science to these things, I read a book about it. You can laugh if you want.”
    I wasn’t laughing. It wasn’t my first glimpse of the contemporary medievalism and won’t be my last if I survive another year or two. I wasn’t laughing, and I said nothing. Mike sat smoking, expertly driving his twentieth-century artifact while I suppose his thoughts were in the seventeenth, sniffing after the wonders of the invisible world, and I recalled what Johnny Malcolm had said about the need for legends. Mike and I had no more talk.
    Adelaide Simmons was dourly glad to see me. From her I learned that the sheriff and state police had swarmed all over Harp’s place and the surrounding countryside, and were still at it. Result, zero. Harp had repeatedly told our story and was refusing to tell it any more. “Does the chores and sets there drinking,” she said, “or staring off. Was up to see him yesterday, Mr. Dane—felt I should. Couple days they didn’t let him alone a minute, maybe now they’ve eased off some. He asked me real sharp, was you back yet. Well, I redd up his place, made some bread, least I could do.”
    When I told her I was going there, she prepared a basket, while I sat in the kitchen and listened. “Some say she busted that window herself, jumped down and run off in the snow, out of her mind. Any sense in that?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œAnd some claim she deserted him. Earlier. Which’d make you a liar. And they say whichever way it was, Harp’s made up this crazy story because he can’t stand the truth.” Her clever hands slapped sandwiches into shape. “They claim Harp got you to go along with it, they don’t say