Dead Man's Song полностью

“Okay,” Crow said, nodding. “I’m taking you on faith, Newt. Don’t make me sorry about that. You can turn your recorder on.” He paused and closed his eyes, collecting scraps of old memories from a closet deep within his mind. He began speaking before he opened his eyes. “If you can believe it, except for Val’s dad being killed, the stuff that happened here these last few days were nothing compared to what happened thirty years ago. I mean, Karl Ruger and his cronies were bad enough, but back then we had someone as close to the devil as anyone I ever hope to meet. And like I told you yesterday it wasn’t the Bone Man…he wasn’t the one the papers nicknamed ‘the Reaper.’ I’d bet my life on that right now, and I can say that because I did stake my life on it back then.”

“Then, who…?”

Crow glanced left and right as if looking to see who was listening and then leaned close and in a hushed voice said, “Ubel Griswold.”

“I know that name…” Newton flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Griswold—yeah, he was the last of the victims, right? A local farmer?”

Crow shook his head. “I figured you’d have that wrong. I mean, yeah, Griswold was a farmer, but he wasn’t one of the victims.” He glanced at Val. “You know, baby, I don’t think I’ve even said that name out loud in…what? Twenty years? Whew!” He turned back to Newton. “It’s not a name one says lightly, no sirree. At least not me. Folks around here openly blame the Bone Man for what happened, but it was Ubel Griswold. He was an evil, evil man.”

“You’re confusing me here, Crow. Who was he?”

“What was he is a better way to put it.” Crow considered. “First let me put things into perspective for you, so let’s jump back thirty-six years ago to when Griswold first moved to Pine Deep, supposedly from Germany, and bought an old stone farmhouse in one of the more remote sections of town, way off of A-32 and nearly impossible to reach except by some obscure back road that’s no longer even there. This was before A-32 was expanded and paved, you understand. Back then it was called the Pinelands Highway, which was a joke because it was just dirt and gravel. When they built A-32 twenty-six years ago, a lot of the smaller roads became officially abandoned since many of them were cut into the state forest. That’s why they built the road in the first place, to keep traffic out of the forest. Anyway, Griswold settled himself down to raise cattle and generally kept to himself. His farm was small but he had a fair-sized herd for the available room. There are, however, no records of him ever selling a single one. Odd, don’t you think?”

Newton shrugged. Even after eight years in Black Marsh, what he knew about cattle farming would barely fill the back of an index card. Other than the fact that they were big, smelly, and went “Moo!” he didn’t know from cattle beyond medium rare at Outback Steakhouse. “Private sales?”

Crow shook his head and continued, “Griswold ran his farm more or less by himself. Sometimes he’d turn a couple of acres over to crops like pumpkins and corn and gourds, and then he’d hire day labor, always hiring drifters as his day labor. Not regular migrant workers, mind you, but hoboes, bums, guys like that. Never any local people.”

“So what? Cheap labor is cheap labor, and, who knows, maybe he felt sorry for them.”

Val said dryly, “I don’t think that was it.”

“No,” Crow agreed, “I think he just liked the fact that these were people no one would ever care about.”

“How do you mean?”

“If they went missing, I mean. No one would ever know if they went missing—no one would care.”

Newton laughed. “What are you saying? That he was doing…what? Feeding them to his cows?”

“I think he was killing them, is what I’m saying.”

“Killing them?” That knocked the smile from Newton’s face.

“It lays out like this. For four years Griswold ran his farm with the drifters acting as day labor, and no one ever noticed a damn thing. Then the fifth year was the Golden Harvest.”

“What’s that?”

“Local farmer’s legend,” Val said. “The Golden Harvest was the year we had the best crop that was ever reaped in these parts. Who knows why, but the crops went absolutely wild. Understand—when you plant, the birds get about half the seed and of the rest only a fraction actually produces a harvestable crop. That’s why farmers sow so many seeds, far in excess of expectations, so that the resulting crop will be enough. Well, that year it seemed like every seed that was sown took root and bore fruit.”

Crow nodded. “And what a crop! Jesus God! Ears of corn so big that they actually made it into textbooks as agricultural oddities. Tomatoes bigger than softballs and sweet as sugar, and apples that would make any teacher cry. Newt, this was like farmer’s heaven.”

“What does it have to do with Griswold?”