Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones Page 9

  “About time if you ask me. Keep your voice down. It’s hardly romantic for them to hear us bickering. What about that Kate, hm? Nice girl.” Hadewych smacked his lips.

  Jason walked into the kitchen. He took the butcher knife from the drawer. He paused, trying to remember what he had meant to do with it. I’m feeding Charley. Right. He autopsied the turkey—robotically, like a scene from Psycho at one-quarter speed. He speared meat into the dog dish.

  “You’ll see,” said Hadewych, “This party will make an enormous difference in your life. Just don’t ruin the evening with your… fantasies.”

  “Whatever.” Jason had forgotten what they were talking about. He couldn’t think. He was picturing Zef’s door. Zef’s locked door. He wanted to kick that door in, to take Kate in his arms and run away with her… before she could be with anyone else.

  “Shake on it?” said Hadewych.

  Why hadn’t he told her? Why hadn’t he outed Zef to her? Could Zef even… Yeah, he probably could. Jason put down the knife, took down a dog bowl, and filled it with water.

  “Break the wishbone with me, at least,” said Hadewych, jovially. He held up the little “V” of bone and waggled it. “Come on. Aren’t you curious?

  Jason blinked. Wishbone? He put the water aside, returned to the table, and took a seat. The wishbone game seemed genuinely important, somehow. Why? It just did. Let’s decide the outcome. Who wins, me or him? Once and for all. But he wasn’t sure which “him” he meant, the father or the son.

  He took off one glove. His knuckles pressed Hadewych’s—as when they’d opened the Van Brunt tomb together, each gripping a handle of the chain cutter. This was the answer. They’d summon the oracle of the bones, as men have done for centuries. Since before the first Thanksgiving. Since before the Roman Empire. Since the days of the ancient Etruscans. Or perhaps further back. As they have since Eden.

  “On three,” said Hadewych. “One… two… three!”

  They pulled, the bone snapped, and their hands flew apart.

  “There you go!” Hadewych said. “Don’t tell me what you wished or it won’t come true.” He held up his bit—a fragment of one side.

  Jason held the rest. Yes, he’d won. But his forearm had swept backwards and had struck the yellow wine glass. The survivor-glass.

  It wobbled, tipped, rolled…

  …and fell off the edge.

  Jason made a desperate wish. It came true. Hadewych caught the glass and set it on the table. He wagged his index finger, grinning.

  “You need to be more careful, young man.”

  Charley didn’t like the smell of the turkey but she ate it reluctantly. Jason busied himself moving the last of his things to the RV, trying to keep his mind off Kate and Zef. He took his three photos, Carl Sagan, Howard Carter, and Eliza in her pilot’s jacket, and hung them up over his bunk.

  Afterward, he sat on a frozen log and waited for the poodle to do her business. She sniffed the grass and turned circles.

  “It isn’t a rain dance, mutt.”

  He frowned up at the house. He wanted to egg Zef’s window. Zef and Kate were taking their time. Yeah. Great. Have fun together. Enjoy yourselves. I’ll be fine down here. Like you care. Like anybody cares. He hated them both. He hated himself. He hated the dog. He hated the whole freaking world.

  He was so in love.

  Charley settled on a patch of ground—hopefully Hadewych’s grave—and watered it. She turned yet another circle. Jason waited for signs of anything more substantial.

  A door slammed somewhere in the house. He heard arguing. A shadow strode across the front yard. Jason sprang to his feet, hurried the dog into the garage, and ran up the driveway. The shadow was Kate. Zef shouted apologies but she raised a hand as if to say “I don‘t want to hear it” and jumped into her car. Jason reached the front yard just as she started the engine. Her headlights swept across his stomach as she drove away.

  Zef stood bare-chested on the front stoop.

  “What are you looking at?” he said and slammed the door behind him.

  Jason grinned… He was looking at a miracle. They hadn’t slept together. He knew it. He knew. Zef had done something stupid. Something embarrassing. Maybe he couldn’t go through with it? Maybe he… couldn’t?

  Jason loved the world again. He loved the sycamore. He loved the driveway. He loved the garage. He loved the dog. He loved the RV. He loved his sheets. He loved his pillow… and he would love his dreams of her.

  Dreams.

  He groaned. He wouldn’t dream of Kate. He would have the Nightmare again. He’d begun to dread sleep, the way people dread the dentist or a tax audit.

  But he did not have the Nightmare that night. For the first time since Halloween, he slept peacefully. He dreamt of Eliza…

  …of a road trip they’d made together when he was ten years old, through the mountains of Colorado. They’d driven up the Million Dollar Highway, the scariest stretch of road in the state. No guardrails. Blind curves. Nothing between his window and an eleven-thousand-foot drop except a painted line and the flying skills of a seventy-two-year old woman. Flying? Yes, that was the word. He’d never seen her fly an airplane—those days were far behind her by the time he came along—but she would have looked like this: hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, fearless. Her face glowed as if she were getting first dibs on the sunlight.

  They neared a turn. Jason felt they would drive into the big blue sky and tumble over. He squeaked. His face felt pinched and full of dread. He checked to make sure his door was locked. He was afraid to lean on it. Someone at the factory might have made a mistake. The door might pop open and he’d fall parachute-less to his grisly death. Tumble over the side and into the water below…

  “Come on, Honey. You have to sightsee for both of us.”

  “I don’t want to sightsee. I want to go home!”

  “And make me miss the view? You’re my eyes. I won’t let you fall. Don’t you trust me?”

  He did trust her. He did. She was his grandmother and she would never let anything bad happen. If she wasn’t scared why should he be? How could he expect to grow up to be a Jedi Knight if he couldn’t look out a stupid window?

  He swallowed and sat up.

  The Colorado mountains wore green calico across their shoulders. The sun broke through a bank of clouds and turned a blue thread of river into a vein of gold. A rainbow arced through the haze of the valley. He’d never seen the world like this. This was flying. This was Superman. This was being a hero. Pride swelled in him. Pride at having overcome his fear. His heart felt… brave and ready, come what may.

  “Is it beautiful?” asked Eliza.

  “There’s a billion Christmas trees.”

  “Those are firs.”

  He fished for the camera. “I’ll take pictures for you.”

  “Thank you, Honey.”

  By the time the road bent above Ouray, Jason was hanging merrily out the passenger window, sun on his forehead, clicking away.

  “That’s the spirit,” shouted Eliza, one hand on the wheel, the other holding his belt loop. “That’s the spirit.”

  When he woke the next morning—on Black Friday—he felt refreshed and peaceful. He did not have to check to see if his parts were still there. He sat up in his bunk, yawned, and scratched his head. What had changed? It was as if whatever had been broadcasting the Nightmare into his brain had been blocked. As if something were now protecting him.

  He looked at the picture over his bed. Eliza in her pilot’s jacket, standing next to her Cessna. He touched the photo and whispered, “Are you here?”

  When he swung his feet to the floor, his eye fell on the mini fridge. His heart leapt into his throat and he began to tear up.

  All the magnetic poetry tiles had been pushed aside, except:

  LOVE

  YOU

  CHAPTER TEN

  “The Lie”

  “Behold!”

  The shout broke the Sabbath stillness of the forest. A squ
irrel paused on the side of an oak, attentive, its tail curling like a question mark. Below its perch, a young man with auburn hair straddled the ruts of the aqueduct trail and raised his arms as if to part the Red Sea.

  “Behold, good people of Sleepy Hollow! I bring you proof! Incontrovertible proof”—he gestured to the lumpy pile of horseshit at his feet—”that the Headless Horseman doth truly exist!”

  The squirrel shook its head. It turned tail and disappeared into the sway of branches, leaving Jason alone with his work. Jason knelt and fished a trash bag from the back pocket of his jeans. His hands moved quickly, mechanically. He inverted the bag and covered the chunks, trying to gather them all at once, but half went rolling and he had to corral them with a twig. He knotted the bag, jumped to his feet, and pressed his nose to his elbow.

  Ugh. Why does horseshit smell so bad? It started off as grass. How can mere grass go so terribly wrong?

  He checked his work gloves. Both were clean. Good. He hated to have his hands exposed. His Gift had become so damn sensitive, ever since Halloween. And what psychic visions might a man get from touching horseshit? Better not to know. He waved the air, gathered his gear, and walked on.

  He swung the bag of manure as he walked, stopping now and then to spear a fast food wrapper or the shed skin of a drinking straw. Naked branches crossed overhead, stripped of all but the most determined, doomed leaves. Underfoot, the October carpet of orange and rust had faded into the browns and squalid yellows of late November. Jason himself was the most colorful thing in the woods. The Department of Sanitation had issued him a bib of fluorescent Gatorade-orange, standard uniform for a juvenile offender. The bib read COMMUNITY PAYBACK across the shoulders. The words felt like an open invitation for the townsfolk to pelt him with rotted fruit. He carried a pole for stabbing and a bag for stuffing. He used the pole as a walking stick, mostly, ambling along like an exile in the wilderness.

  He couldn’t complain. Not about his sentencing, anyway. Thirteen weeks of trash pickup was light punishment for wrecking a three-hundred-year-old church. He’d been lucky to be seventeen and a minor. If he’d been a year older, he might have gone to prison for criminal mischief.

  Westchester County had tasted its first sugar-spoon of snow that morning, a flurry of dandelion seeds that had bumbled to earth to wink and vanish without taking root—autumn’s eviction notice. Jason didn’t mind the cold. He’d been raised in Maine, after all, where even in mid-October he might awaken to find the silver Mercedes crackling with frost.

  From this elevation he could see the entire town. The horn of the Metro-North Railroad sounded in the distance. A long mournful note followed by two short hiccups. Jason stopped to lean on his staff and rotate his sprained ankle. He felt peaceful and happy.

  Eliza was alive.

  Well, she existed, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it? She was watching out for him, even now, and knowing that made him feel brave. Knowing that made him feel that all this nonsense—all these mysteries and dangers—were just… scribbles on paper napkins. Confetti strewn in his path to stab with his stick and shove in his bag.

  She existed. And if that were true, then it was worth all the rest. He was glad that there was magic in the world. For the first time in forever.

  Would he ever have the Nightmare again? He hoped not. He looked down the hill but couldn’t see the broken bridge. Ichabod’s bridge. Too many trees were in the way, too many locust and birch suckling at the sides of the Pocantico. He shivered. He’d never gone back that place. He’d been too afraid. And if something planned to kill him “at the bridge,” then he would avoid bridges for the rest of his life.

  He walked on. A chain-link fence appeared, surrounding a field of headstones. This was the newer area of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery—more modern, more orderly—with room for several hundred souls, though it was only a fragment of the vast graveyard on the other side of the river. Eliza slept here, in the Palmyra section. Just slept. And hopefully she had good dreams too.

  A familiar figure appeared among the graves. Joey raised a hand in greeting. “Nice outfit!” he called. “Who says straight boys can’t dress?”

  “Ha! Ha!” Jason yelled. “Get in before dark!” He waved and walked on.

  He hiked farther north than ever before. The path curved leftward, following the path of the water tunnel below. He might have been walking along the furrow left by an enormous mole. The ground dropped away on either side into gullies of twig and stone and leaf. He found plenty of trash. The wind off the Hudson had been miserable all week, blowing lids off cans and kicking litter up the hill to catch in the trees above town.

  He passed a square building of grey stone—Van Brunt Quarry stone—part of the aqueduct system that Brom Bones had helped build. Jason tried the door. Locked. Or rusted shut. An access to the tunnels? He worried about those tunnels under Gory Brook Road, under his house and connected to it. How extensive were they?

  And what if Hadewych knows about the tunnels? Could he have hidden the Horseman’s Treasure down there?

  He imagined finding the thing and commanding the Horseman to murder Hadewych, how Hadewych’s head would look popping off his shoulders and rolling away. Poetic justice.

  And I’d be safe. Safe forever from—

  CLIPPETY CLOP! CLIPPETY CLOP! CLIPPETY CLOP!

  Jason froze. He’d been stupid. The Horseman had caught him napping and now—he raised the pole and whirled, ready for a fight to the death.

  “Woah, boy, woah!” shouted Kate.

  Her horse Gunsmoke skittered backwards.

  Jason dropped the pole and raised a glove. “Hi! Sorry.”

  Kate Usher wore black riding boots, a royal blue riding jacket, a black hat, and she carried a crop. She looked amazing. Jason cringed, regretting his orange PAYBACK bib.

  “We shouldn’t have snuck up on you,” she said, running her hands down the rose-grey neck of her horse. Gunsmoke snorted at Jason disapprovingly.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your prints.” Kate pointed to the ground. “Size fifteen?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Who else could it be? It was like tracking Bigfoot.”

  Jason made claws in the air and growled. Another disapproving snort from Gunsmoke. “Welcome to my community service.”

  “For the Church?”

  “Thirteen weeks.”

  “Ouch. So I guess you’re busy? I was hoping we could talk.”

  “I can talk while I work.”

  “No.” She glanced up the trail. “Too many joggers. I wanted to talk somewhere private.”

  “Oh.” Wheels turned in his head. Somewhere private? With Kate?

  “Another time. Enjoy, I guess. See you at school.” She prodded Gunsmoke and the horse turned away. Its tail came up and it gumballed out a pile of manure.

  Jason stared at the pile.

  Clean up manure or slip away with Kate? Am I an idiot?

  “Hold up!” he shouted, chasing after.

  “You sure?”

  Jason doffed his bib and satchel and tossed them into the air. They caught in the overhead branches. He tossed the staff aside. “What can they do to me?”

  Kate bit her lip. “Jump up. There’s room.”

  Jason looked dubiously at the stirrups. His brain flashed images of his childhood—of playgrounds and monkey bars and how he’d always found a way to fall off things when girls were watching.

  “Uh, how?”

  “Left foot here. Grab the pommel. Good. Now up and over.”

  Jason left the ground, squeezed in, and the curve of the saddle forced them together from chest to pelvis. He put his hands to his face, bit his lip and shook his head. He could imagine what he looked like. Thank God she couldn’t see him. Thank Darwin that horses had never evolved a rearview mirror.

  He’d never straddled a horse before. Or a beautiful girl. He didn’t know where to put his hands. Well, he had places in mind but he didn’t know where he was allowed to put his hands. He
rested them on his knees. Gunsmoke shifted. He flailed for an overhead branch to keep from tumbling off.

  “Hold on, mister!” Kate laughed. She kicked Gunsmoke in the haunches, cried “Yah!” and snapped her crop back and around. Gunsmoke reared up, gave a vigorous nod, and attacked the trail at a full gallop. Jason had no choice but to throw both arms around Kate and hold on for dear life.

  They thumped along, her body pressed to his. He tried not to think about that. Not now. No. Not a helpful thought. Don’t. Don’t. You’ll embarrass yourself. He busied his mind with thoughts of the extra community service he would have to perform. He pictured Hadewych in his boxer shorts.

  But Kate crowded out everything. She was a girl—and girls are terrible, destructive, maddening, and infuriating creatures that do these things on purpose. He wasn’t embarrassed that he wanted her, but he wouldn’t let her win by being obvious about it. Questions kept popping up, though—where was she taking him? Why the privacy?

  Could it be…?

  No way.

  They galloped deeper into the woods.

  Eliza had always been frank about sex, which she endorsed with gusto. Her advice on the subject had been plain: “The body is a temple, Honey. All I ask is… when the time comes… be choosy about where you worship.”

  And had the time come? No! Of course not. They weren’t going into the woods for that. Kate wasn’t that kind of girl. Was she?

  No. Stop it.

  Dusty libraries.

  C-Span.

  Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies… for amber waves of grain…

  The horse slowed. The maddening motion stopped. Jason exhaled for the first time in many minutes.

  “Isn’t he a demon?” said Kate, scratching Gunsmoke’s head. “We’re doing a stunt-riding competition next year. You should see us. I’ve never had so many bruises in my life but we’re getting really good.” She scratched the horse between the ears and pulled the reins rightward; Gunsmoke crossed a shallow gulley and began to climb again. The woods thickened around them. The trees here still bore lavish red and orange foliage. A guidepost read “Witches Spring Trail.”