by Ninie Hammon
No, they had to put the kid somewhere out of sight, somewhere wouldn’t nobody happen to stumble over him. They needed to leave him with somebody.
Somebody like … oh, maybe Sarah Throckmorton.
It was worth a shot.
Instead of sitting on her butt waiting for Malachi, Viola would go pay a visit to Sarah Throckmorton. Wasn’t far, she could be back at the clinic in half an hour. If the kid was there, she’d get him to tell her what’d happened to his daddy. But if the kid was there, she didn’t really need to ask. If he was there, Malachi had deposited him there. Which meant Malachi had defied her.
And what was Viola gonna do about that if that’s what it turned out to be?
Chapter Twelve
Sarah stood by the ancient live oak tree, catching her breath, feeling around on the white bun at her neck to rearrange the hairpins that held it there. She had forgotten how much energy it took to look after a child. She’d spent the past quarter of a century since her children moved away — and took her precious grandchildren with them! — with her fur babies, her cats. And they did require a fair amount of care because there were so many of them. Twenty-one altogether — the nineteen who lived with her in the house and the three other feral cats she fed, left bowls for them on the back porch but they were too wild to want to join the family.
But even all of them put together weren’t as needy as the boy with the big sad eyes. Poor little Toby Witherspoon. Figured out his father had killed his mother. Killed her, and then he barely escaped getting killed by his own father. What must a thing like that do to a little boy not even ten years old?
She could imagine how broken his heart must be. The little chap needed so much love, way more than poor old Sarah could give him. But she would try, do the best she could!
And the best she could figure to do was to try to keep him busy, keep him doing things so he wouldn’t have time to dwell on the loss of his parents.
So they’d come out into the woods this morning to pick blackberries. Sarah knew where there was a lovely blackberry bush up the hill behind her house. She hadn’t gone there in a while, what with that Jabberwock thing and all, but it was the primary source of fruit for Sarah’s legendary blackberry cobbler. And blackberry preserves. And blackberry pie. And blackberry compote. She already had enough Mason jars full of blackberry-somethings to feed all the blond men in the Norwegian Army, but she’d brought Toby out here today to help her gather more fruit, made it sound to him like she really needed his help, like if he didn’t lend her a hand she didn’t know how she’d manage to pick all those blackberries all by herself.
She knew little boys, had raised four of them by herself, along with three girls, after Arnie passed. She knew didn’t nothing build a fire under them faster than believing they were helping out, that somebody needed them.
Picking fruit would occupy his time, keep him from thinking about sad things. Keeping him from being afraid of Viola Tackett!
Sam had explained it all to her when she’d dropped Toby at Sarah’s house, said she would completely understand if Sarah didn’t want to get mixed up in something like that, crossing Viola Tackett. Said she would find somebody else to look after Toby if—
And Sarah’d set her straight quick. Of course, she would look after the poor dear little boy. And no, she was not afraid of crossing Viola Tackett. Pooh on Viola Tackett. What was the worst the woman could do to her? Did Sam think Sarah Throckmorton was afraid to die? Pooh. Of course, she was ready to meet her maker. Had been ready for years. Wasn’t nothing Viola Tackett could do to scare Sarah Throckmorton.
Well, except hurt Toby. That was the thing. Sarah didn’t give a hoot about that loudmouthed Tackett woman, but Sam made it clear that if she found Toby … it wouldn’t be good. She didn’t go into details about why but she didn’t have to. Viola had released Toby’s father even after she knew he’d killed Toby’s mother, had given the boy back to him!
Sarah understood that agreeing to look after Toby also meant agreeing to hide him, to keep Viola Tackett from finding him.
Toby came running up to her with her blackberry bucket only half full, his face creased with fear.
“Somebody pulled into your driveway,” he said, pointing through the trees and down the hill to her house. “It looks like that lady judge, the one that … you know, the one that—”
“She see you?”
“No. I jumped behind the blackberry bush.”
“Good for you.”
Sarah couldn’t see well enough to know who it was who’d pulled into her driveway. Cataracts. Doctor told her about them a couple of years ago and she kept meaning to go have something done about them. He said they could take ‘em off, help her see better. And she meant to do it, she really did. Just one thing and then another come up, and it was hard to get somebody to take care of so many cats while she was gone and she just never got around to it.
She wished now she had, wished she could see.
Well, the boy could see. They’d go with that.
“You think she came here looking for … me?”
“Don’t care why she come. Don’t like that woman. Never have. Even if she just come to borrow a cup of sugar, I ain’t talking to her.” She gestured toward the deeper woods behind them. Even if Sarah couldn’t see more than three feet in front of her face, she could find her way around in these woods. She’d come squirrel hunting with Arnie when they’d first built the house half a century ago. She usta come looking for her boys, switch in her hand because one or the other of them was about to get their backsides tanned, she’d looked for blackberries and mushrooms and hunted ginseng. Wasn’t an inch of the woods Sarah Throckmorton didn’t know.
She took Toby’s hand and told him, “We about to hide so good we won’t even be able to find our own selves.”
And the two of them slipped into the shadows between the trees and vanished.
Chapter Thirteen
Zach pulled his fancy black car into the driveway of Sarah Throckmorton’s house and screeched to a halt in front of the garage door.
Took Viola a minute to catch her breath.
Wasn’t no reason to be flying down the road like his pants was on fire, but Zach was having a grand ole time acting like a five-year-old. Soon’s he stopped the car, Viola reached over and whacked him hard on the shoulder.
“What?” he wailed plaintively. “You said you was in a hurry.”
“You don’t want to get on my last nerve, you hear me, boy? You surely don’t want to do that for a fact.”
He seen she meant business then.
“You take one more corner too fast, fling me up against this door, and it will be the last time you get behind the wheel of this car or any other. You understand what I’m saying to you? I will run this car off the top of Chisolm Bluff and watch it tumble all the way down into Troublesome Creek.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. Sounded like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. It totally confounded Viola how conflicted that always made her feel, seeing him cow before her like he done. Oh, she wanted her boys to do what she told ‘em, wanted ‘em to toe the line. Course she did. But dagnabit, she would dearly love to see one of them stand up on his hind legs and act like a man. Like he had some stones. Just once. Only one of them wasn’t a weak-willed, lily-livered pansy was … Malachi.
Malachi didn’t take nothing off nobody. Never did. Not even his own mother.
So what was she going to do if he really did defy her, if he done something to Howie after she expressly told him to leave Howie be? Oh, she could make good on her threat to off the McClintock woman. But that wasn’t it. What would she do if Malachi really was … on the other side? Really did intend to stand up to her, refuse to bow to her authority as the person in charge of the county?
Could she …?
Malachi?
Do something to Malachi?
She shook it off. One step at a time.
Right now, she wasn’t a hundred percent sure she wouldn’t
see Howie Witherspoon and his kid walking down Main Street fit as fiddles.
She wouldn’t, of course. But she wasn’t sure. She would forestall all what-if’s and what’ll-I-do-with-Malachi, to-Malachi-if … until she knew exactly what’d happened.
Sarah Throckmorton was a shot in the dark, of course. She might not know Jack about Howie or the boy. But it wasn’t like Viola had anywhere else to look.
The house was a right pretty little thing, reminded Viola of them stories in kiddie books about gingerbread houses in the woods. It was white, looked freshly painted but that was just because it had aluminum siding and it didn’t need painting. It grew that green moss stuff up on the sides, though, but apparently Sarah kept that cleaned off.
Had a regular old picket fence and a gate. And cats all over the yard. The place was plum broke out with the critters.
There was two big, fat cats lying on a rug in the sun on the porch, a black one was perched on top of one of the fence posts. How did cats do stuff like that, anyway, hop up onto the top of things and sit there like hood ornaments? She opened the gate and two or three cats came her way — a calico and two white ones but she kicked out at them to shoo them off. Viola didn’t mind a dog now and then but she couldn’t stomach cats.
“Get on away from me,” she growled and the animals backed up. She left the two sunning on the porch and stepped up to the door, knocked loud.
Nobody answered.
She knocked again. Still nothing.
Wasn’t no car in the driveway, but it could be in the garage. Where did a woman like Sarah Throckmorton have to go? All her kin had moved off, or so Viola thought.
She opened the screen door, knocked, called out, “Anybody here?” and tried the doorknob. it wasn’t locked, of course, so she went inside. Sarah Throckmorton was nowhere to be found, and Viola would’ve dearly loved to chat with that woman. Viola hadn’t found ‘xactly what she was looking for, but she mighta found out what she wanted to know. Maybe.
A loaf of homemade bread sat wrapped in plastic in the middle of the kitchen table, with crumbs around it. A jar of homemade jam sat beside it and the plastic tablecloth was sticky, like a gob of jam had been dropped on it but not cleaned up proper. A bread knife lay beside two clean plates in the kitchen dish drainer and two glasses.
Viola poked around in the bedrooms — beds was made, but in the small one off the den, she found a baseball cap hung on the bedpost. It was a Cincinnati Reds hat, a small one — about the size a boy like Toby woulda wore — Toby and a couple dozen other little boys she could think of.
Still, her gut yanked into a knot when she seen it. She’d been driven forward by curiosity and anger. Didn’t nobody defy Viola Tackett and live to tell the tale. But somehow, some part of her managed to believe that she was wrong about the whole thing. That Howie Witherspoon had gone off somewhere with his kid and his going didn’t have nothing to do with her Malachi. Nothin’ a’tall.
But it was clear there was a kid here, a little boy. And if that little boy was Toby Witherspoon, then Sarah was looking after him ‘cause he didn’t have no daddy.
And if he didn’t have no daddy, wasn’t but one thing coulda happened to him.
She clutched the baseball cap in her hand, marched out the front door with it and got in the car.
“We going back to the Middle of Nowhere. And go on ahead. Let ‘er rip. Drive fast as you want. Me’n yore little brother need to have us a talk right now!”
Chapter Fourteen
“Moses, this is Jolene Rutherford and I have to talk to you.” The message was one of three his machine had recorded while he had been at the grocery store yesterday afternoon. He got so few messages he hadn’t even noticed the little red light blinking until this morning. And when he listened to this one, he didn’t bother with the other two. “I’m going to sound like a raving lunatic, but Moses, I need your help. I … I’ve hit the jackpot — ghosts. Ghosts — plural. Not one, not even a dozen. I don’t know how many. Real. I’m not sure I believed there was such a thing, not even after all the conversations with you. There are real ghosts here, and that’s not even the most important part. Moses, the whole county has vanished, I don’t know how many people. Nobody knows how many there were here to start with but there’s not a soul here now. They’re all gone. Vanished. Nothing but empty houses. I don’t think they’re all dead — they’re not. My father is one of them, his house is … I know I’m sounding crazier every second, but please, call me. I don’t know what to do when it’s real. Please … help me find my father.”
Moses Habakuk Weiss locked the door of his little shop behind him and went out to his car parked on the street out front. He looked back at the building once and saw his own reflection in the window — a bent old man, a hundred years old if he was a day — beneath the words “Craftsman Cobbler, shoe repairs, insoles, shoelaces.”
Beneath that: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu, 4th Century A.D.
And beneath that: “Every journey seems like a thousand miles if your feet hurt.” Moses Weiss, 1945.
He’d thought that was a nice touch. His Flossie had not agreed. She thought it was, what was it she said? Cheesy. Yes, cheesy. And she reminded him that she thought so every day for thirty-five years. He multiplied it out once, got the grand total of days he’d listened to her litany of things she said every day. If she’d lived another couple of years, it would have been near twenty thousand.
You missed a spot shaving. And its variation, you have shaving cream under your ear.
Smile once in a while, it won’t break your face.
Collect payment up front. If they don’t pay — hold their wing-tips hostage until they do.
Flossie was so much nicer dead than she’d ever been alive. Over the years, he’d discovered that a whole lot of people were like that.
Jolene had been nice alive, though, always nice to him even when others weren’t. He’d met her when she’d brought in that pair of Christian Louboutin red sole ankle-wrap sandals with a broken buckle. He never forgot a pair of shoes. He’d wondered since then if the shoes had just been an excuse, if she’d heard about him on the grapevine and wanted to come check him out. He’d almost asked once, but didn’t because he knew she’d tell him the truth and he didn’t really want to know it’d been a setup. That part didn’t matter now.
“They’re all gone. Vanished. Nothing but empty houses. Please … help me find my father.”
That’d been the kicker. He would not ever have written Jolene Rutherford off as a lunatic. She was absolutely sane — shrewd, calculating and manipulating, things you had to be sane to pull off.
But even if he’d thought she was crazy, he wouldn’t have written her off and she knew that. He didn’t write anybody off. Not with the things his old eyes had seen in his seventy-three years on the earth. He knew, understood on a gut level, a soul level, that absolutely anything was possible.
“Help me find my father…”
There was such terror in her voice, such desperation. Whatever “reality” might be in this situation, it was absolutely true that Jolene was a desperate, frightened woman. Moses Weiss could read people. Of course, he could. When a man’s dead wife was whispering in your ear that a fellow was lying when he looked sincere, or was sincere when he looked like he was lying, after a while you learned how to recognize the tells even without the whispered teleprompter.
He opened the back door to his car, tossed his suitcase inside, closed the door. Opened it again, closed it. Opened it again, closed it. Then he just stood there.
He couldn’t do this, of course. Absolutely could not.
He could be walking into the belly of the beast. And this time … this time, he knew in his bones he would never come back.
No, not this time. He would not rush to the aid of the damsel in distress.
You got a savior complex, you know that, don’t you? Your mother, may she rest in peace, never should have named you Moses.
He turned and walked hurriedly back to his shop, fit the key in the lock from the set of keys so ginormous it sometimes took him five minutes to find the one he was looking for. But the shop key was marked with a faded dollop of pink fingernail polish.
All those keys — what, you’re the warden in a prison and you have a key for every cell?
He walked through the door and closed it behind him. Opened it again and closed it. And again. He hung his raincoat and hat on the hook by the door and walked behind the counter and put on the black apron he wore because … because he always wore it. Cobblers wore aprons. They just did. He glanced out through the front window, where all the words were backwards from the inside, and saw his car parked on the street.
He had put his suitcase in the car.
He walked to the door.
It was supposed to rain.
He reached up and took his hat and raincoat off the hook and put them on, stepped outside, went to the car, opened the back door and started to get his suitcase out. Paused.
He really ought to help Jolene.
He didn’t want to.
The degree to which he didn’t want to do it ought to indicate how badly he needed to because the really hairy ones were always preceded by resistance.
Okay, he’d go.
He went back to the door of his shop, opened and closed it three times, locked it, then got into his car and drove all the way to the corner before he turned around and pulled back into the space in front of the shop. But this time, he merely had the argument with himself in the car, lost, and pulled back out again.
He only changed his mind one more time before he got on the expressway, Interstate 75 north to Kentucky.
He was still wearing his black apron.
But that was okay. After all, Moses Weiss was a cobbler.
Chapter Fifteen
Viola marched in the front door of the veterinary clinic loaded for bear. On her way to the clinic she’d washed through all kinda different emotions. Some of them was real different from what she normally felt. She felt sad, betrayed. And her feelings was hurt. Of course, she was madder’n dammit, too, and she went with that one because it was a familiar emotion, felt comfortable as slipping the bunions on her old foot into a worn and comfy house shoe. When she got her hands on Malachi, she was gonna shake the truth out of him and—
