Shadow Stations: Unseen by Ann Grant

boils, and insect stings. Maybe it would take the swelling down. I could try them one by one.
    Loaded down with tubes and boxes, I cut across the aisle and almost collided with an old man in denim overalls who smelled like cough medicine and greasy hair ointment.
    My heart thudded.
    It was him. The farmer from the photo in the paper. My gaze glommed onto the gouge in the side of his skull. The monstrous dent started behind his left ear, rose to the crown of his head, and looked like a huge tire had rolled over his face and kept on going, taking half his brains with it. The farmer’s dull eyes met mine.
    “ You’re Joe Goode,” I blurted.
    “ That’d be me,” he said in a gravelly voice.
    “ My boyfriend was on his way to interview you when he had the car accident.”
    He focused on me as if seeing me for the first time, and raised an elephant-hide finger. “I seen that light come at him.”
    My heart almost stopped. “What’re you talking about?”
    “ I seen it come across the ground.”
    “ You seen nothing,” snapped a broad-bodied woman in a blue wool coat who appeared out of nowhere with a pharmacy bag in her hand. She had to be his wife. They had the same worn out faces. She shoved her big body between Joe Goode and me, but the old man managed to grab my sleeve.
    “ I seen it come at him,” he said again.
    “ You seen nothing.” She tried to pry his hand off my arm.
    “ I seen it, and I heard them whispers in the pasture.”
    “ And shit and two is eight and a fart’s a fraction.” The woman glared at me. “He don’t want to talk to you.”
    “ I heard them whispering at me.”
    “ We’re not standing here all day talking nonsense.” She dragged him out of the pharmacy into the crowd at the cash registers. Stunned, I went after them, but in nothing flat I’d lost them and turned in a complete circle. Where did they go?
    Whispers. The old man had heard them on his own land.
    I dumped my stuff, ran outside, and stood in the rain, trying to spot the farmer and his wife in the lot. A red pickup truck peeled out toward York Road. When it swung toward the light, I saw them in the front seat. I’d never catch them. The signal changed and they were gone.
    Numb, I ran in the store, bought the creams and salves, and hurried to the Camaro, soaked from head to foot, my mood as black as the sky.
    The police hadn’t said anything about a light. They told me that Ben went off the road and died when the car caught on fire. His body was so badly burned they identified him by his dental records. The terrible phone call from Ben’s editor came back to me, the quake in his voice, the late hour, the faint scream of the ambulance I hadn’t placed, not knowing that Ben was dying in a ditch.
    A light coming at him. A light from where? From the Grasslands. Ben had died in front of the construction site.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    Trying to hold myself together, I sped out of the lot and drove across town to a florist on Washington Street, where I bought flowers for Ben’s grave. They wouldn’t last long in the rain, but I wanted him to have fresh flowers.
    I wound through the streets to St. Thomas Aquinas, a stone church that had stood on the edge of the battlefield long before the Civil War. The townspeople had used most of the churches as makeshift hospitals during the war and St. Thomas had been in the thick of the action. A plaque on the sidewalk in front of the church described how the floor had run red with blood where the wounded lay between the pews.
    I pulled the heavy door open and walked to a small chapel in the corner. No trace of the trauma from the war remained. The place had a timeless, hushed atmosphere that brought me a small measure of peace every time I came there.
    Dozens of candles flickered in front of a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I dropped three dollars in the donation box, lit a candle for Ben, and said a silent prayer. Ben had been a Catholic, the religion he was born into, so