Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [62]
She went back inside the house and hung her canvas coat on a peg and checked the locks on the doors, then sat down on the side of her bed, her head bent forward, the images and sounds from her dream gradually disappearing. The wind gusted under the house, causing the floor and the walls to creak and a tin cup to topple into the kitchen sink. She got up from the bed to pull the curtain on the window just as a net of lightning bloomed in the clouds. By the corner of the old bunkhouse, she saw a shadow. No, it was more than a shadow. It not only moved; light reflected off it. She stared into the darkness, waiting for the electricity to jump in the clouds again. Instead, drops of rain began to patter on the roof and in the dust around the windmill and in the nubbed-down grass near the barn, and all she could see through her bedroom window was darkness and the sheen of rain on the bunkhouse and an empty dark space where she thought she had seen the outline of a man.
She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser and reached inside it and groped under a pile of folded clothes for an object she hadn’t touched or even thought about in many months. She went into the kitchen and pulled open a drawer, and from a collection of screwdrivers and hammers and pliers and duct tape and wrenches and scattered nails, she removed a flashlight. Then she put on a baseball cap and unlocked the back door and went outside, this time without her coat.
She moved the beam of the flashlight along the side of the bunkhouse and the stucco cottage, then shone it on the railed horse lot and through the open door of the barn, the light sweeping against the stalls and wood posts inside. She crossed the yard and looked inside the bunkhouse, then inside the cottage. She searched behind the bunkhouse and worked her way back to the corner where she thought she had seen the figure.
The rain was ticking on her cap and her shoulders, spotting her clothes and running down the back of her neck. She walked toward the barn, the flashlight beam spearing the darkness and bouncing off the tools and dust-covered tack inside. She took a deep breath, oxygenating her blood, and stepped through the door into the heady odor of horse sweat and decayed manure and pounded-down clay that was green with mold.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“Nothing,” said the figure in the shadows, raising his arm against the glare of the flashlight.
“You were looking through my windows.”
“I was not. I just wanted to talk. I didn’t understand what you said there at the grocery store.”
“About what?”
“You said I shouldn’t presume. You said I didn’t know who I was messing with. You thought I was threatening you? I wouldn’t do that. You made me feel bad, like I was a bully or a freak or something. Ma’am, is that a pistol in your hand?”
“What does it look like?”
“We’re kindred spirits.”
“No, we’re not. How long have you been out here?”
“Just a few minutes. Maybe I was gonna knock on your door. I know you stay up. I’ve seen those candles glowing in your chapel late at night.”
“How did you see them?”
“I got a telescope on my deck. I do stargazing sometimes. It’s a hobby I got.”
“Where’s your vehicle?”
“Down the road a mite.”
“You’re a voyeur, Reverend Cody. Get off my property. If you ever come on it again, I’ll shoot you.”
“Don’t talk like that. You got me all wrong, ma’am.”
“No, I don’t. I think you’re haunted by a terrible deed you did to a woman or a group of women. It’s something so bad you can’t talk about it to anyone. But that’s your problem, not mine. Get out of here and never come back. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am, if that’s what you say.”
She lowered the pistol and stepped aside. When he ran past her, his face was disjointed with fear and humiliation, like that of a child caught in a shameful act. She went back inside the house and locked the door behind her and replaced the small-caliber pistol in the bottom drawer of her dresser. She took off her damp clothes and dried herself with