Excerpt: Dream Painter

PROLOGUE

The deputies shuffled about the charred body, pretending to examine the walls of the room they had already scoured every square inch of, pausing to glance out the second story window. Now and then, one would pace across the room, peering down at a wooden table, the sole piece of furniture in the room, to examine the contents of a wooden box filled with tubes of paint. They probed the room with eyes too weary and shocked to truly see anything more, and let their eyes roam everywhere but at the floor beneath their feet, trying to avoid one another's eyes, trying to comprehend the scene they had been called to. John Ames held a handkerchief to his face and glanced over at Doug Evans. The young man was swallowing rapidly, the adam's apple he had not yet quite outgrown bobbing above his stiff brown collar. He's going to be sick, thought John. This is taking too long...

Sheriff Holden stood in a corner of the room, his words low and muffled, as he conferred with Dr. Beckle.

“How?” he asked, “How is this even possible? How in hell do I write this one up?”

And Hell, thought Paul Beckle, might be your answer.

The older man glanced back at the blackened remains, one ankle and a foot all that was recognizable in the greasy pile of ash and char. In the thirty five years he had served as coroner he had attended only two strange deaths, deaths so bizarre he wondered how many, if any, other coroners had ever recorded anything like them. He had borne witness to the body of Molly Gelt, who stuck her head out the window of a parked but running car, to talk to someone outside. She had inadvertently placed her elbow on the window remote and in a panic, as the window began to close, not realized why it was closing in time. She had literally caught her own head in the closing window, breaking her neck. He had been called when Sarah Midlin, an elderly woman with a fear of imagined intruders, was killed when she forgot about her own booby trap of a series of bricks piled above her own front door. Most of the time when he was called, it was to those who succumbed to natural causes. There had been the average number of vehicular accidents, stabbings, gunshot wounds, and hangings over the years. But even those were few. This was a small community, relatively quiet. Not much happened that one could not expect to happen. Not much happened that wasn’t supposed to happen.

This, Paul thought, was not supposed to happen. Not in Middle Ridge, not anywhere. Paul Beckel shook his head and looked away, plunging trembling hands in his pants pocket. He felt as if the hairs on the back on his neck were bristling, and he answered the sheriff as truthfully as he knew how.

“If I believed in black magic,” he muttered, “I would have an answer for you. But I don’t. So I can’t tell you.”