VACANCY & ARIEL

That afternoon I called my old traveling companion Whirlie Henley and asked if he was available for a walk in the woods; I would pay the same rate as before.

“You ain’t goin’ after long, tall, and vicious again, are ya?” he asked.

“It’s a related matter,” I told him. “But I can guarantee we won’t be running into her.”

“How the hell you gon’ do that?”

“Trust me. She’s not anywhere near West Virginia.”

“You still chasin’ after her?”

“You might say.”

Grudgingly, Henley accepted my offer and we arranged to meet two weeks from the day at Mickey’s—it would take me that long, I believed, to convince Ariel we should make the trip. As things turned out it took me only ten days. She flatly resisted at first on the grounds she might miss an opportunity to contact Isha. I told her it seemed that Isha was a persistent sort and I cited the plethora of material in her book relating to predestination. “If there’s any truth to it,” I said, “you can’t avoid another encounter.” Acceding to this argument, she tried another tack, saying she had no wish to return to a place where she had been so miserable. I hadn’t informed her of my actual reason for returning; she was in a fragile mental state and I did not want to risk upsetting her to the point that she would blow off her tour. Instead I’d told her I had business in Green Bank and now I suggested that while I was taking care of it, she could visit the Krishna temple in Moundsville. “You’ll make ol’ Shivananda’s day,” I said. Her memories of the temple were not altogether unpleasant, and finally she relented. Six days later, after a thirty-minute drive followed by a ten-minute walk, Henley and I stood beside a massive, richly tagged boulder at the confluence of two streams, shaded by a venerable water oak. Its leaves had turned, but few had fallen. The air was damp and cold, the ground soaked by a recent rain.

“You told me what you’re lookin’ for,” Henley had said when I met him at Mickey’s, “I coulda saved you some worry. Everybody ‘round Durbin knows the Damsel Oak. Witchy women come out here to cast spells. High school kids use it for partyin’. Thing’s damn near a tourist attraction.”

While Henley watched I dug with a short-handled shovel, excavating a trench around the boulder. Ariel’s description stated that Ah’raelle had buried her equipment deep. Given that she had been working with her hands, I had not expected “deep” meant other than the extreme end of shallow. A couple of feet down, maybe. But I had no luck at that depth. Sweaty and irritated, my shoulders aching, I took a break.

Perched atop the boulder, Henley removed his Mountaineers cap, ran a hand through his graying hair and said, “Willowy Woman was pretty damn strong. You might hafta go down a ways.”

“No shit.” I examined my palms. Unblistered for now, but not for long.

“’Course we might have the wrong rock.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then somebody coulda already dug up whatever it is you’re after.”

“So how the Mountaineers doing this season?” I asked, hoping to cut short this litany of woeful possibility.

Henley’s breezy mood soured. “Doin’ all right.”

“Yeah, I caught part of the Syracuse game. That was a Little League game, they would have applied the mercy rule and shut it down.”

“Boys had some injuries was what it was.”

“Sure, that’s it.”

The stream chuckled and slurped along in its banks. Henley appeared to be listening to it.

“Maybe you better get on back to diggin’,” he said. “Ain’t much light left.”

The sun lowered and a starless dark descended. The occasional rustle from the surrounding woods—that was all the sound except for the rush of the water and my grunts. Henley built a fire and cooked. After a meal of beans and franks, though I was fatigued and sore, I jumped down into the trench again, working in bursts, taking frequent rests. Around ten o’clock, at a depth of five feet, I struck something on the stream side of the boulder. I scraped dirt away from it, then fell to my knees and pried it free. A case covered in dark red material. My hands were so cramped I could barely pick it up, and when I managed to get a grip I discovered it weighed in the neighborhood of sixty pounds. I remembered how easily Ariel had leaped from the hollow, holding it in one hand. Like Henley said, she had been pretty damn strong.