Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [22]
Bessie, Patta, and Alta looked at each other, eyes wide. They’d made contact. No prayer had ever been answered so quickly or so palpably.
Alta closed her eyes again and asked: “Who are you?”
More quickly this time, the planchette moved over the board’s single letters, spelling out its reply: I-A-M-A-D-E-A-D-I-N-D-I-A-N.
“A dead Indian?” said Bessie.
At that point, the girls heard a ghostly wail that scared the hell out of them all. It was Wanda, trembling and crying. Before anybody could stop her, she bolted out of the room, screaming.
Melissa may have been hard of hearing, but not that hard. She stormed into the bedroom and saw the Ouija board on her daughters’ laps. “What,” she said, “have you brought into my house?”
Nobody said a word.
Melissa turned on Alta. “I might expect this from Patta and Bessie,” she said. “They like to flirt with wickedness. But you know better, Alta. How could you take part in bringing evil into our home? Don’t you know you are mocking God? Don’t you know the price of mocking God?”
Alta looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Mother. We were just making a game out of it. We’ll put it away.”
“No,” said Melissa. “You’ll do more than that: You’ll take it outside and put it in the incinerator and burn it, this instant. You will do it, Alta. And you’ll do it alone.” Melissa stood and watched her daughter slip into her clothes. Then she followed Alta out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
As soon as she was gone, Bessie turned on Wanda. “Tattletale.”
Wanda started to whimper again. “Leave her alone,” Mary said to Bessie. “You asked for this trouble, bringing that infernal thing in here.”
A half hour later, Alta returned. As they were all falling asleep, she whispered to Bessie: “Mother went back to bed. I hid the Ouija board in the barn.”
THE OUIJA BOARD INCIDENT HAD BEEN GOOD FOR A FEW DAYS of misery and preaching around the Brown home. The guilty took their chastisements silently, with only Alta showing convincing remorse.
Halloween night arrived. The Browns went to a costume party at the Grandview church ward, and everybody danced and laughed until they were giddy and tired with the silliness of it all.
At about two that morning, Alta and Bessie sneaked out their bedroom window to the barn. It was a silent autumn night. Bessie lighted a kerosene lamp and Alta dug out the Ouija board. It was time to get back to their spirit.
Alone in the barn, Bessie and Alta sat with the board on their knees, their fingers on its planchette, and they made the same inquiries as before. Again, the words spelled out under their fingers: “I-AM-A-DEAD-INDIAN. I-WAS-KILLED-BECAUSE-I-KILLED-A-MAN. HE-STOLE-FROM-ME. I-WANT-BACK …”
Bessie and Alta heard the barn door creak. They saw a figure move through it and into the dim light. It was their father. Bessie might have been relieved, but by this time she had already learned some hard lessons about her father. Will Brown was a nice man until you made him angry. Then he was not a nice man at all.
He walked toward them. “Are you conjuring spirits in the middle of the night?” he asked. “Are you my children, or have you already given yourselves to the devil?” Will picked up an ax. He took the Ouija board from their hands and hacked it to pieces. “If I ever find you worshiping the devil again,” he said, “I’ll give you to the Danites.”
That was the end of Ouija boards in the Brown household. In the weeks that followed, Bessie and Alta tried a time or two again to contact the spirit, holding hands in the dark, in secluded places far away from home. But nothing ever happened. No voices answered, no images materialized. They might as well have been praying.
CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT, AND THEN CAME THE NEW YEAR. In the second week of 1930, Provo awoke to a snowfall that spread across its valley and mountains. It snowed the rest of the week.
One night, after the day’s snow had fallen, a white horse wandered into the backyard of the Provo farmhouse. Since Grandview was a small community,