Blown Away (Nowhere, USA Book 6)

by Ninie Hammon

  “She’s gone,” Viola said simply, her voice tear-clotted.

  Malachi crossed the room in two long strides and took Essie’s limp hand, looking in confusion at his mother.

  “She was shot,” Viola said. And the timber of her voice then was not anguish, the pain of loss or grief. It was barely harnessed rage. “Shot in the belly and she bled to death.”

  “Who …?”

  “I do not know the answer to that question, son,” she said, her words measured. “But I will find out. As God is my witness, I will find out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Cotton didn’t go directly back home after his conversation with Rose Topple. He made several important stops in Beaufort County first. Neither Jolene nor Stuart spoke when he was finished telling the story that had been told to him by the old woman in the Carlisle nursing home. The three looked from one to the other, sharing their disbelief and shock with their eyes.

  Finally, Jolene found her voice.

  “No wonder those spirits …” She had to grab another breath to continue. “No wonder they were so disturbed, so agitated."

  “You think that’s it, then,” Stuart said, his eyes bloodshot, his face haggard. “The bones. The little girl made peace with the Jabberwock when she gathered them up …”

  “… so maybe we can make peace with it if we do what she couldn’t do,” Cotton said.

  He had thought about it all the way home, and even though his brain was foggy from lack of sleep, it still seemed like the only avenue open to them.

  “And that is?” Jolene said.

  “We bury the bones. Put them in a proper grave, have a service, put up a marker, respect those poor souls.”

  “It’s not just them, though, is it?” Jolene said. “The un-buried ones. There’s something else. Something more.”

  “Something worse,” Stuart said.

  “Yes, I believe there is, but we can only do what we can do. I went to Home Depot and got the tools we’ll need for the job.” But that’s not all Cotton got while he was in Carlisle. He’d stopped by a friend’s house and borrowed another “tool” he prayed they wouldn’t have to use. Tomorrow, we’ll go to Fearsome Hollow and get the bones …”

  “If they’re still where she put them,” Jolene said.

  “Right. If. It’s been almost a hundred years. In a century …” Stuart said.

  “Like I said, we can only do what we can do.”

  They fell silent again then. Each a prisoner of their own hopes and fears. And the specter of night was on them. It would be dark soon and they must not sleep or the nightmare monsters will come for them. How could they possibly function tomorrow if they stayed up another night?

  Cotton shook his head. One step at a time. He was too exhausted, his thinking too muddied to venture out there into tomorrow. He could only do the next thing, the step in front of him.

  “Enough about tomorrow — only have a handful of synapses still firing and if I’m not careful they’ll set my hair on fire. Tell me what the two of you did today.”

  “We did what we could do,” Jolene said. “We went to my father’s house and took the map off the wall, took it to Persimmon Ridge and put it up in the West Liberty Middle School auditorium, smack in the middle of the big wall in the back. We used stickpins to spell out a message. Couldn’t say much, so pretty basic: ‘Looking for you. Reply.’ But we used three stickpins for each letter so you can’t miss them.”

  “I’m not hopeful it will do any good,” Stuart said. “Your father figured out the message because he was familiar with the map, saw that the stickpins had been moved. Just some random person looking at it …”

  “And the blackboard?” Cotton asked.

  “Took it off the wall in Charlie’s mother’s house and took it to the veterinary clinic,” Jolene said.

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “On the wall in the waiting room, above a row of chairs.”

  “What did you say?”

  “As much as we could fit on there. It wasn’t a very big chalkboard.”

  “I was careful to leave the note about birdseed, though,” Stuart said. “Charlie’s mother must have written it and maybe Charlie never erased it because it was … you know, a message from her mother. Charlie would think something like that. I wrote as much as I could fit there. Charlie will recognize my handwriting — she’ll know I wrote it.”

  “We told them who we are, that we’re looking for them,” Jolene said, “that as far as we can see, everybody in Nowhere County has vanished.”

  “And about the Jabberwock, how it wipes out memories, and what happened to us in Fearsome Hollow.”

  “We asked who was there … on the other end,” Jolene said. Cotton knew they were seeking names — that Pete, Charlie, Merrie and Thelma were still alive. “Told them about the suddenly-old houses.”

  “Did you tell them about Reece and—?”

  “No!” Then Stuart said, more softly, “We don’t really even know what happened there so what’s the point in telling them about it? We did say you’d gone to talk to Rose Topple. And we said to erase what we’d written and write something in its place, tell us what happened to them. Just that much filled the whole blackboard.”

  “If that veterinary clinic has become the only medical facility in town, someone will see it eventually,” Jolene said.

  “If they can see what we’ve put there from wherever they are,” Stuart said.

  “We’ll go back in the morning and see what they replied,” Jolene said.

  “If they replied,” Cotton said.

  “We need to tell them what Rose Topple said about the bones her mother hid, that we’re going to—” Stuart said.

  “We can do that on our way to Fearsome Hollow in the morning. By then, we’ll know if we’re getting through,” Cotton said.

  “You sound like you don’t think we will,” Jolene said.

  “The only time we ‘made contact’ was in the presence of the Jabberwock. When it was in your father’s house the day we had the freak show, and when you sensed the opposition in Charlie’s mother’s house. The Jabberwock was there then … and later, when it wasn’t there …”

  “Nothing,” Stuart said. “Just empty buildings.”

  “But it wasn’t just the presence of the Jabberwock,” Jolene said. “It was the presence of people. Somebody was there … on the other side. Somebody responded by adding pins to the map, and Charlie wrote a message back to you.” She looked at Stuart. “When we went back after we picked up the equipment at Reece Tibbits’s house, maybe my father and Charlie … just weren’t home at the time.”

  “Maybe it requires both — the presence of other people and the Jabberwock,” Stuart said.

  “And maybe it requires only one — either the Jabberwock or other people,” Jolene said doggedly. “If that’s the case, perhaps we’re onto something.”

  “We’ve done all we can,” Cotton said. “If we can make contact, we’ll tell them what we’re about to do.”

  The three fell silent, then Stuart said softly, “There’s a lot riding on that little chalkboard message.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Merrie burst into the breakroom calling out, “Mommy, come see. Come see what I finded in the waitin’ woom.”

  Charlie was distracted. “I’ll come in a minute. Mommy’s busy right now.”

  It was late. The sun had not yet set out there on the flat, but shadowed twilight oozed out from beneath the trees in the hollows of Nowhere County. The Breakfast Club sat together, sipping bad coffee. It was the first chance they’d had to share more than bits and snatches of what’d happened to them that day.

  Charlie had arrived at the clinic while Sam was looking after Essie Tackett, and had kept herself and Merrie judiciously out of sight. She’d stepped out into the hallway when she heard Malachi had returned, however, and ran into Viola, who hadn’t been so distraught with grief that she failed to shoot Charlie a menacing look. Then Viola drove away
with her daughter’s body, and Sam shooed Malachi back into the clinic to clean up his wounds.

  That he’d gotten when Duncan Norman had tried to kill him.

  Charlie’s head was swimming. Like she and the others were circling the drain of some horrible outcome, and the monstrousness and horror grew with every revolution as they got closer and closer to the black nothingness that threatened to swallow them all whole.

  How many dead now?

  Charlie shook her head, had literally lost count.

  Add two more. Poor handicapped Esther Ruth Tackett and the Rev. Duncan Norman. There was no sense searching for his body in the dark, but Malachi would deal with that as soon as it got light tomorrow. Charlie had seen the look of profound gratitude wash over Sam’s face when Pete Rutherford offered to carry the news about the minister’s death to his wife, Miriam.

  First her daughter. Then her husband.

  On and on and on.

  Charlie wanted to curse and scream and … just sit in a corner somewhere and sob. Instead, she tried to concentrate on making sure she didn’t leave out something important in her description of her encounter with Fish.

  “He said it, the Jabberwock killed that guy?” Sam was still having trouble getting her arms around that part. “It was a thing, a real thing — not … just some apparition in the mist?”

  “It was a real thing when it picked up our car the day we went to Fearsome Hollow with the Tungates looking for Abner,” Malachi said.

  Charlie felt so sorry for Malachi. Oh, not because he was bunged up — and he was, scratched and scraped and bleeding all over, most certainly had at least a mild concussion. But she figured he’d probably seen worse on a bad day in boot camp. It was the emotional wounds you couldn’t see that she knew hurt a lot worse than clocking his head on a rock. His sister was dead, had been shot by … who knew? He’d walked in seconds too late to tell her goodbye, and his mother’d been as cold as wind off a glacier. Sam said Viola’d told Malachi she didn’t need him, or his brothers, for that matter, to “see to Essie.” Said that was woman’s work, and she’d call Malachi about “the service” tomorrow.

  Not that Charlie claimed to be great at reading people, but it’d be safe money to bet Viola Tackett was way more angry over her daughter’s death than she was grief-stricken. Somebody had shot her daughter, and Viola would look under every rock and down every rabbit hole in the county to find out who it was. Charlie would not want to be that person when Viola caught up with them!

  “Even that day, all we could see were shapes in the mist — certainly not a creature with teeth and claws,” Charlie said. “You should have seen the scars on Fish’s chest!” She shuddered. “No wonder he crawled into a bottle afterward and never came out. What he described was a right-off-a-movie-set monster. Correction: monsters. Plural. More than one.”

  “The more-than-one-part fits,” Sam said. “We heard whispers in the mist that day when we were first-graders.” She looked at Malachi. “You said you thought it was the other children at the fair. And what Abby said — everything fits that the Jabberwock is a ‘them.’”

  “Mommeeee,” Merrie wailed. “I finded it on da wall and it wasn’t dere before — you have to come see now!”

  “Remember what we talked about — how whining isn’t allowed.”

  “But I did ask in my sweet voice,” Merrie countered. “You didn’t come, so din I whined.”

  Charlie caught a small smile on Malachi’s face.

  “What?”

  “Well, she did ask in a sweet voice …” he said.

  “It’s a blackboard. Come on, I show you.”

  “Is there a blackboard somewhere …?”

  Sam shook her head.

  Charlie got up and allowed Merrie to drag her out of the room toward the clinic waiting room.

  “One of da puppies — the black one wiff one white ear. He gotted out of the pen and I had to chased him. That’s when I see-ed it.”

  Merrie let go of her mother’s hand and raced ahead of her. When Charlie saw what was affixed to the far wall above the chairs in the waiting room, her knees felt like bags of water. She walked as if in a trance to stand in front of the blackboard that had been nailed there.

  Printed on the top of the blackboard were the words: “Not in Kansas Anymore, TO-DO”

  How did …?

  Who …?

  She gulped in enough air not to pass out and found her voice, told Merrie to go get Sam and Malachi, tell them her mother needed them right now.

  When the others arrived, they stood staring in disbelief at the blackboard that had not been there the last time they were in the clinic waiting room.

  “Where’d that come from?” Sam asked.

  “Wait a minute — isn’t that the—?” Malachi began, then Charlie finally found enough air to speak.

  “It’s not just some random blackboard … it’s the one from my mother’s kitchen.”

  That was a conversation stopper.

  “The one where the words appeared in your husband’s handwriting?” Sam asked, but it wasn’t a question.

  “And where the Jabberwock wrote ‘Stay and play with me,’” Malachi said, not a question either.

  They had planned on trying to use the blackboard to communicate with the Jabberwock, see if they could talk to it as it had talked to Charlie. But the plan was interrupted by a trial … a dead teenager … and Toby … then Hayley’s body and Rusty … It just went on and on and—

  “Who brought it here?” Sam asked. “Went to your mother’s house, took it down, and nailed it to the wall here?”

  Charlie found she only had the energy to shake her head and shrug.

  “And for what purpose?” Malachi followed.

  Sam and Malachi took the ball and ran with it — coming up with first one explanation and then another about how the blackboard had ended up in the veterinary clinic waiting room, who had moved it, and why.

  Merrie tugged on Charlie’s hand and pointed proudly to the big round thing in the center of the blackboard. “I drawed it for you, Mommy. It’s a flower, but wiff just white chalk, no pretty colors.”

  The drawing could have been a flower on a stem and lots of leaves. It could also have been a dead spider. Or a splatter of white paint. The little girl had had to climb up onto the seat of a chair to reach the blackboard on the wall. There was chalk dust sifted like powdered sugar on the chair cushion outlining two little footprints. It was only then that Charlie noticed the top of Merrie’s sneakers.

  “How’d you get that chalk all over your shoes?” she asked.

  Merrie picked up the eraser resting beside a piece of chalk in the metal tray attached to the blackboard. “It comed off dis when I used it.”

  Then Charlie noticed that the only thing on the blackboard was the big flower and its associated appendages. Nothing else.

  She had trouble finding the air to speak.

  “Did you … erase …?”

  “Uh huh. I had to wiped it all off, ‘rased it clean so I could make da flower big as the sky.”

  When the blackboard had hung in her mother’s kitchen, there had been nothing on it — except the words “get bird seed” in her mother’s handwriting. Her mother’s words! Charlie had been so careful to leave them. They’d been all she had, the last words her mother … Now, they were gone.

  Charlie was surprised at the surge of emotion that welled up in her chest — so fierce it even muted the shock of finding the blackboard here. Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

  The little girl hadn’t known what she was doing, didn’t realize when she erased the blackboard that she was destroying something of incalculable importance. Merrie didn’t know she was wiping away words written in the handwriting of someone Charlie loved desperately.

  Now, the message that had been on the blackboard was lost forever.

  Chapter Forty

  The boys brought Essie’s dead body home to the Nower — to the Tackett House — in the back
of Obie’s black pickup truck, carried her upstairs to the big bathroom off Viola’s bedroom and lay her on the floor where Viola could see to her. Then she made them all leave.

  “Shoo outta here, git!” she told Obie, Zach and Neb. “This here is private female stuff.”

  She didn’t have to send Malachi away. She’d done that already. Oh, not because she was mad at him, though she was. She didn’t have all the puzzle pieces yet, but she knew what he’d done. Not exactly the how, when and where of it, but she knew enough. He’d killed Howie Witherspoon, and might even have been in self-defense. Malachi coulda gone over there to threaten him, warn him not to hurt that boy Toby Malachi was so determined to protect. Maybe Howie’d drawn down on him and Malachi didn’t have no choice. It really didn’t matter anymore to Viola.

  Funny how things changed up inside you like that, how something that’d seemed so important suddenly wasn’t important at all. And what hadn’t never mattered a fig to you was about the onliest thing in the world that did.

  She’d told Malachi to stay where he was at, that she didn’t want the help of none of her boys. She needed to see to their sister private-like. Then she’d asked real nice, well, as nice as she was able, for him to come on over tomorrow about noon. She’d have Essie all laid out proper and the whole family needed to gather round and do the funeral and the burying.

  He’d asked her about that part, but she’d put him off, said she needed time to think on it and figure out what exactly it was she wanted to do. Which wasn’t true, of course. Viola already knew what she was gonna do — about the burial, anyway, had figured that part out the same way she’d decided to take the Nower House to live in. They was things in life she and her kin had been denied that other people had, and now it was time to collect on all that had been kept from them. They would live like they wanted, where they wanted, do whatever they wanted with whomever — whatever suited them. Shoot, she’d been planning that part as she’d bumped along in the truck back to the day she’d rode the Jabberwock. She seen the opportunity then, and set out to lay her plans. And she’d accomplished everything she had set out to do, just like she’d plotted it out.