Page 11 of Sins of the Fathers
“I keep telling myself that,” Dawson replied. “Dowsing is better than visions.” He didn’t get visions often, but when he did they were usually premonitions of danger that left him feeling shaky and overwhelmed. While they had helped him avert disaster in the past, the dreams definitely took it out of Dawson’s hide.
Grady carried the shovels, while Dawson had the willow rod. They stopped beneath the large oak, and Grady stared up into its branches, finding it all too easy to picture them laden with bodies.
“Here goes nothing,” Dawson muttered as he took hold of the two sides of the ‘Y’ and held the branch straight out at waist height. He closed his eyes, and a look of concentration came over his face.
The end of the stick twitched, and Dawson walked slowly, looking like he was being tugged by an invisible leash. He circled the tree, and when he walked beneath a low, sturdy branch, the dowsing rod jerked in his hands, tipping sharply downward. Dawson raised an eyebrow, and Grady readied his shovel.
Dawson put the dowsing rod back into the duffel and took out a trowel, a shotgun with salt rounds, and an iron crowbar in case the ghosts decided to play rough.
Grady had a can of lighter fluid and a Zippo in his pocket, and he knew Dawson had a canister of salt in his jacket. He hoped they could send the ghosts on their way without a fight, but he doubted they’d get off that easy.
“Go slow,” Dawson cautioned as they began to scrape away the layers of old leaves and fresh dirt from beneath the spreading branches high overhead. The tree’s trunk was wide enough that Grady doubted he and Dawson could clasp hands around it with their outstretched arms.
They worked in silence for a while, slapping at insects and wiping sweat from their foreheads. Inch by inch, they worked their way down through the loam. Dawson’s trowel hit something solid.
“Damn—tree root. False alarm,” he grumbled.
Grady expected the same when his shovel met resistance. When a yellowed bone surfaced, he fought the urge to throw up. “I’ve got something.”
He fell to his knees and grabbed the trowel, carefully clearing away the dirt that covered what looked like a human femur.
“I was really hoping the legends were wrong for once,” Dawson said, sounding as nauseous as Grady felt.
Grady swallowed down bile. “If it’s true that the killers decapitated the Samuels first, then they must have draped the bodies over the branches or tied the ropes under their arms to hang them in the tree. Like a backwoods gibbet.”
“If they left them like that, then the bones are probably scattered all around here,” Dawson said. “The ones animals didn’t drag off, that is.”
“And the people who did that got away with it.” Grady’s fist clenched at the injustice.
“They didn’t go to jail,” Dawson agreed. “But if the ghosts are still killing their descendants after all this time—there’s rough justice there.”
They worked a while longer, turning up more bones, which they carefully stacked at the base of the tree. Some were broken, others had been gnawed. Grady didn’t need a course in anatomy to know that they hadn’t found three full adult skeletons. Still, he figured they had most of the big bones for each of the victims, and finally, toward the bottom of the trench, they cleared around the tree were three skulls.
Grady murmured the words of an old blessing as he dug, hoping to pacify the spirits whose last, uneasy rest was being disturbed—and to fend off the dark, ancient entities said to be drawn to gallows trees.
“Do you hear that?” Dawson asked.
Grady raised his head. “Hear what?”
“Exactly.”
When they hiked in, the woods were full of sounds—birds chirping, insects buzzing, and small animals scurrying through leaves. Now, an eerie silence descended over everything, and Grady felt the air turn chill. The hairs on his arms rose, and the trickle of sweat down his spine turned icy.
He set the shovel aside and grabbed the crowbar, as Dawson did the same and took up the shotgun.
“We’re here to let you rest in peace,” Dawson shouted to the empty clearing. “John and Matilda—and Isaiah. You’ve waited long enough and have taken your vengeance. It’s time to move on.”
Unseen hands shoved Grady and sent him sprawling, while an invisible force picked Dawson up and threw him to land—hard—several feet away. Grady hung on to the crowbar and came up with it poised to swing.
“Daw? You okay?”
“Watch out!” Dawson shouted as a gray form took shape right in front of Grady, the ghost of a man dressed in a plain shirt and overalls—with a neck that ended in a bloody stump. The lack of a head didn’t keep it from zeroing in on Grady, reaching out to grab hold.
“Back off!” Grady swung his crowbar through the apparition, and it vanished, only to reappear a few feet away. This time, the ghost tossed him through the air like a rag doll. Grady let go of the crowbar to keep from injuring himself. He managed to avoid the foundation stones but knew he’d be bruised and limping the next day from the impact—if he survived, and his vision swam when his head thumped on the packed dirt.
A shotgun report echoed through the clearing as Dawson fired at Matilda’s ghost when she loomed over him. But he’d spotted the threat to Grady and racked his gun for a second shot. “Get the fuck away from him,” Dawson shouted.
The rock salt made the farmer’s ghost vanish, and Grady ran for the tree, knowing their best bet lay in setting fire to the spirits’ resting place.
