“In the legends, the transformation takes years,” Yune said. “Whole generations, maybe. But that’s legend. You don’t think it takes that long, do you, Ms. Gibney?”
“I think only weeks, months at the very most. For awhile during the transformative process from Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton, his face might look like it was made out of Play-Doh.” She turned to look at Ralph directly. She found this difficult, but sometimes it was necessary. “Or as if he had been badly burned.”
“Don’t buy it,” Ralph said. “And that’s an understatement.”
“Then why wasn’t the burned man in any of the footage?” Jeannie asked.
Ralph sighed. “I don’t know.”
Holly said, “Most legends hold a grain of truth, but they’re not the truth, if you see what I mean. In the stories, El Cuco lives on blood and flesh, like a vampire, but I think this creature also feeds on bad feelings. Psychic blood, you could say.” She turned to Marcy. “He told your daughter he was glad she was unhappy and sad. I believe that was the truth. I believe he was eating her sadness.”
“And mine,” Marcy said. “And Sarah’s.”
Howie spoke up. “Not saying any of this is true, not saying that at all, but the Peterson family fits the scenario, doesn’t it? All of them wiped out except for the father, and he’s in a persistent vegetative state. A creature who lives on unhappiness—a grief-eater instead of a sin-eater—would have loved the Petersons.”
“And how about that shit-show at the courthouse?” Yune put in. “If there really was a monster that eats negative emotions, that would have been Thanksgiving dinner for it.”
“Do you people hear yourselves?” Ralph asked. “I mean, do you?”
“Wake up,” Yune said harshly, and Ralph blinked as if he had been slapped. “I know how far out it is, we all do, you don’t need to keep telling us, like you’re the only sane man in the lunatic asylum. But there is something here that’s way out of our experience. The man at the courthouse, the one who wasn’t in any of the news footage, is only part of it.”
Ralph felt his face growing warm, but kept silent and took his scolding.
“You need to stop fighting this every step of the way, ese. I know you don’t like the puzzle, I don’t like it, either, but at least admit that the pieces fit. There’s a chain here. It leads from Heath Holmes to Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton.”
“We know where Claude Bolton is,” Alec said. “I think a trip down to Texas to interview him would be the logical next move.”
“Why, in God’s name?” Jeannie asked. “I saw the man who looks like him here, just this morning!”
“We should discuss that,” Holly said, “but I want to ask Mrs. Maitland a question first. Where was your husband buried?”
Marcy looked startled. “Where . . . ? Why, here. In town. Memorial Park Cemetery. We hadn’t . . . you know . . . made plans for that, or anything. Why would we? Terry wouldn’t have turned forty until December . . . we thought we had years . . . that we deserved years, like anyone leading good lives . . .”
Jeannie got a handkerchief from her purse and handed it to Marcy, who began to wipe at her eyes with trance-like slowness.
“I didn’t know what I should . . . I was just . . . you know, stunned . . . trying to get my head around the idea that he was gone. The funeral director, Mr. Donelli, suggested Memorial because Hillview is almost full . . . and on the other side of town, besides . . .”
Stop her, Ralph wanted to say to Howie. It’s painful and pointless. It doesn’t matter where he’s buried, except to Marcy and her daughters.
But once more he kept silent and took it, because it was another kind of scolding, wasn’t it? Even if Marcy Maitland might not mean it that way. He told himself this would be over eventually, leaving him free to discover a life beyond Terry fucking Maitland. He had to believe there would be one.
“I knew about the other place,” Marcy went on, “of course I did, but I never thought of mentioning it to Mr. Donelli. Terry took me there once, but it’s so far out of town . . . and so lonely . . .”
“What other place would that have been?” Holly asked.
A picture rose unbidden in Ralph’s mind—six cowboy pallbearers carrying a plank coffin. He sensed the arrival of another confluence.
“The old graveyard in Canning Township,” Marcy said. “Terry took me out once, and it looked like nobody had been buried there for a long time, or even visited. There were no flowers or memorial flags. Just some crumbling grave markers. You couldn’t read the names on most of them.”
Startled, Ralph glanced at Yune, who nodded slightly.
“That’s why he was interested in that book in the newsstand,” Bill Samuels said in a low voice. “A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township.”
Marcy continued to wipe her eyes with Jeannie’s handkerchief. “Of course he would have been interested in a book like that. There have been Maitlands in this part of the state ever since the Land Rush of 1889. Terry’s great-great-grandparents—or maybe even a generation greater than that, I don’t know for sure—settled in Canning.”
“Not in Flint City?” Alec asked.
“There was no Flint City back then. Just a little village called Flint, a wide spot in the road. Until statehood, in the early twentieth century, Canning was the biggest town in the area. Named after the biggest landowner, of course. When it came to acreage, the Maitlands were second or third. Canning was an important town until the big dust storms came in the twenties and thirties, when most of the good topsoil blew away. These days there’s nothing out there but a store and a church hardly anyone goes to.”
“And the graveyard,” Alec said. “Where people did their burying until the town dried up. Including a bunch of Terry’s ancestors.”
Marcy smiled wanly. “That graveyard . . . I thought it was awful. Like an empty house nobody cares about.”
Yune said, “If this outsider was absorbing Terry’s thoughts and memories as the transformation progressed, then he would have known about the graveyard.” He was looking at one of the pictures on the wall now, but Ralph had a good idea what was going through his mind. It was going through his, as well. The barn. The discarded clothes.
“According to the legends—there are dozens about El Cuco online—these creatures like places of death,” Holly said. “It’s where they feel most at home.”
“If there are creatures who eat sadness,” Jeannie mused, “a graveyard would make a nice cafeteria, wouldn’t it?”
Ralph wished mightily that his wife hadn’t come. If not for her, he would have been out the door ten minutes ago. Yes, the barn where the clothes had been found was near that dusty old boneyard. Yes, the goo that had turned the hay black was puzzling, and yes, perhaps there had been an outsider. That was a theory he was willing to accept, at least for the time being. It explained a lot. An outsider who was consciously re-creating a Mexican legend would explain even more . . . but it didn’t explain the disappearing man at the courthouse, or how Terry Maitland could have been in two places at the same time. He kept coming up against those things; they were like pebbles lodged in his throat.