by Ninie Hammon
“Abby.” Shep’s one-word answer.
Then Abby kept talking out Shep’s mouth.
“If’n you ever want to see Becky Sue and that baby girl, you got to stop them meddlers. The Jabberwock don’t like them messing in its affairs. It ain’t never gonna let them people go unless we do what it says.”
“And if we do?” Robbie asked. “If we … shoot them people, kill them, then—?”
“Then Becky Sue and Abby and all the others …” Shep looked around the room at the men gathered there.
“Jethro, you want yore Trina back, do ya?”
Trina was his girlfriend. They’d been living together long’s anybody could remember. The woman was ugly as a mud fence, but Jethro did love her something fierce.
Jethro didn’t say nothing, appeared he couldn’t. But he nodded. He set his jaw and nodded.
“Jim Bob,” Shep said to the man who’d helped him run the McGintys’ tractor into a creek when they were drunk teenagers. “You want to see them boys again? Want to watch Derek play baseball next summer? Jason’ll be old enough for tee ball by then, won’t he? Hope he ain’t on the Food Town team with them ugly tee shirts Oscar Manning got ‘em. The color of mashed peas. Abby said it was Oscar’s girl, Chastity, picked ‘em out.”
Jim Bob’s voice was ragged. “You telling me if I do what you say, if I go out and shoot these people I’ll get my boys back? Jenny and the boys?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.” Shep paused, looking from one man to the next, making eye contact with each one. “And I’m also tellin’ you that if you don’t get rid of them meddlin’ outsiders …” Shep lowered his voice to a whisper for effect. No, Abby lowered his voice. “They’s gone for good. You ain’t never gonna see hide nor hair of any of ‘em ever again.”
“You done lost yore mind,” Wilbur Gibson said. Then he looked around at the men who’d stopped drinking to listen to Shep when he’d come in. “Ya’ll can’t honestly be considerin’ this.” He looked at Jim Bob Claywell. “Listen to yourself, Jim Bob. If I go out and shoot these people … You’re a decent Christian man and” — he turned and looked at Shep — “and Shep Clayton here is crazier’n a soup sandwich.”
They argued it back and forth, got loud, almost come to blows a time or two, but in the end, none of them agreed to help Shep and Claude. Some of them wanted to. Actually, most of them wanted to, but they flat out couldn’t wrap their minds around what it was gonna take to get their kin back.
He didn’t know what Abby was gonna do without no army to make sure they got rid of the meddlers, but apparently Abby had figured something out. Might be she’d found her own army because she told Shep later that him and Claude would have “help.” Said they wouldn’t be by theirselves.
It’d been pouring rain on Monday when they’d first tried to stop the meddlers. Shep figured he might have hit one or the other of them but there wasn’t no way to be sure. He was sure, though, that he hadn’t done enough damage to stop them. They was coming back — today. Abby said.
When it was just him and Claude shooting at them people, they’d gone up into the woods on the mountainside opposite Buzzard Knob to give them an unobstructed view of the buildings and the streets of Gideon below.
That wasn’t the plan no more, though. Now they was supposed to hide up in the woods above the Gideon cemetery. Abby knew that’s where them troublemakers was going and what they planned to do once they got there. But wasn’t gonna work out like they had planned.
Might be some dead people in the cemetery today, but wasn’t gonna be the ones them folks figured. The onliest dead bodies was gonna b’long to Stuart McClintock, Jolene Rutherford and Cotton Jackson.
Sam was horrified by the desperation she saw in Charlie’s face. Even more horrified that it was mirrored in Malachi’s.
“What are we going to do?” Sam launched the words out into the air of Rusty’s not-hospital room and neither Charlie nor Malachi had an answer.
Charlie had said Sarah Throckmorton believed Viola knew Toby Witherspoon was staying at Sarah’s house.
“Maybe she doesn’t know for certain, but she sure enough suspects. Why else would she go to Sarah’s house? And why take Toby’s hat?”
“But how could she possibly—?”
Malachi waved off her question. “What difference does it make now? I have spent my whole life amazed by what my mother could figure out. Somehow … some little thing … somebody. I’d bet she doesn’t know much for sure, but all she has to do is talk to Sarah …”
There were chairs in Rusty’s room, where the three of them had pulled them together yesterday to try to figure out what they would do next. Charlie sank down into one of them, struggling hard not to cry.
“She’ll come after me,” she said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. “As soon as she knows for sure …”
“I think there’s something you need to know.” The words came from the doorway where Raylynn Bennett stood, looking wan and thin and … She was calm, though. There was an eerie peace in the girl’s demeanor. Sam had had neither the time nor the fortitude to question. But she did consider it now, looking at her. Raylynn Bennett had matured twenty years in the past two weeks. She might be a teenager in years, but the person standing in front of them now was a young woman who … who has faced some profound sorrow and somehow survived it.
“Merrie’s okay, she’s not—”
“She’s fine. She put half the litter of puppies together in a kennel with half the litter of kittens, and she’s lying there while they crawl all over her.”
Charlie gave the scraps of a smile to that description.
“I’ll get right back to her, but I think you need to know that Viola Tackett has called a county meeting for today. She put the word out on the phone tree yesterday afternoon and I just heard about it. Margaret Atwood told her neighbor Agnes Wheatley, who told her cousin, Gladys Copley, and her best friend is my Aunt Effie. She just called me.”
That’s what Zach had been doing yesterday. Sam had seen Viola talking intently to her son right after she brought his dying sister into the clinic. Then Zach had gone down the hallway … and obviously into E.J.’s office to use the phone.
“A meeting …” Charlie’s eyes were wide.
The last time Viola Tackett had called county residents together, she had murdered Liam Montgomery.
“What did she say it was for?” Malachi asked.
“She said it was so she could give everybody gasoline.”
“What?” That made no sense.
“I didn’t think it made sense, either,” Raylynn said. “But that’s what she’s telling people. She said she has an ‘inexhaustible’ supply of gasoline, that she wasn’t going to ‘be selfish’ with it, that she intended to give it away free because everybody needs it.”
Malachi coughed in derision. “Riiiiight. Like Mama ever did anything even remotely altruistic in her whole life.”
“Surely, nobody is falling for that line,” Charlie said.
“Oh, people are suspicious. Still … Margaret Atwood said that Viola was putting it out there that the only thing people had to do to get the gas was to show up at noon today and put their names on a list.”
“Then that’s the point. The gasoline is a carrot to lure everybody to her meeting.”
“So she can … what? What does she want everybody in town for?”
Suddenly, Malachi looked pale.
“Essie,” he said. Sam felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. “She is trying to find out who shot Essie.”
“So she gets everybody together … then what?” Sam asked.
“All the suspects … but how does she find out who did it?” Charlie wondered aloud.
Nobody answered.
“She must know something about Essie’s shooting that she’s not telling,” Malachi said. “Neb must have seen more than she said he did. She’s planning to use whatever that is to flush out the killer.” Malachi paused for a beat. “People are goi
ng to get hurt. The frame of mind Mama’s in …” Malachi stood and Sam knew he intended to go into the Ridge and … and deal with his mother.
“I need to get back to E.J,” Raylynn said. “But …” She looked uncomfortable.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“The old man in the waiting room … I think he may have … he smells bad.”
Malachi rolled his eyes. “I washed the pants he had on. I hope they’re dry.” He started for the door. “I’ll clean him up before—”
“Wait!” Sam cried. She could hear the desperation in the word but there was nothing she could do about it. He and Charlie turned to her.
“I know you’re worried about what your mother might do,” Sam said, “but right now … what are we supposed to do? Where do we go from here? It’s one thing after another and we never have a chance to …” She shot a look at Rusty, lying so still on the bed. “We have to figure this out! Us, the three of us. It’s here because of us. It’s our fault. We have to … do something.”
She hadn’t meant for her voice to break, but she was too tired, too scared to keep her emotions in check. All the air seemed to drain out of Malachi.
“Okay, you’re right. We need to … talk. Let me deal with …” He didn’t finish, just gestured with his chin toward the waiting room. “Then … I think we have to find out how he showed up here. That matters. If Moses Weiss came from … out there —“
“But we’ve tried to talk to him,” Sam said.
“He doesn’t make any sense,” Charlie said.
“We have to keep trying, keep at it. He’s all we’ve got. Maybe the three of us together can make some sense out of his ramblings.”
Twenty minutes and a clean pair of pants later, the three of them sat in a semi-circle around the dithered old man babbling nonsense to himself in the waiting room. Sam left Rusty with Pete, who had shown up this morning with his own mystery.
“My map’s gone,” he’d said. “Left here last night and went home and it wasn’t on the wall no more. Somebody come in and took it”.
One more impossible. Like the blackboard. Who … why? None of it made any more sense than the words coming out the mouth of the old man sitting there in damp pants that still smelled vaguely of urine.
“So sorry, just so, such a shame. Winona, did you say? Pretty name, Winona. Baby girls are carried high, and boys low. We didn’t have children, should have. Flossie left after that first year, except she didn’t go anywhere.”
“Flossie? Who’s Flossie?” Sam asked, but the man paid no more attention to the question than he had to the dozens of previous questions.
“A ring frozen in hamburger meat, can you beat that?”
“Who’s Flossie?” Charlie countered. “Is she your wife?”
“Flossie bossy.” He looked horrified. “I never said that, never did. Didn’t think it either. Wouldn’t have. Never.”
“So Flossie was bossy?”
“She never breathed. Little Marilee never drew breath. Just a cold lump in Becky Sue’s belly.”
Becky Sue.
“Becky Sue Potter?” Sam asked. Charlie’s brow furrowed trying to place the name. “She’s pregnant, due any day. We thought she was in labor the day E.J. got bit by Judd’s dog. She lives with Ronnie’s mother and sister in that little red brick house on Elkhorn Road just off—”
“The one that had the walking bridge?” Charlie asked.
Sam nodded.
“It’s old now,” Charlie said. “That house … I passed it this morning on my way here. A couple of days ago, it was fine. But this morning …”
“That means … they’re all dead there. So this guy couldn’t have had a recent conversation with Becky Sue—”
“Unless he talked to her after she died.”
“How do you know Becky Sue Potter?” Malachi asked the old man. He didn’t answer, but he did keep talking.
“Gone, all gone. Dead and cold. Selma and Amelia, too. Gone. Cotton said the Potters would be kind, he promised.”
“Cotton Jackson?” The three exchanged a startled look. “You know Thelma’s husband?”
“Jolene shouldn’t have come with us, though.”
“Pete’s daughter’s name is Jolene, isn’t it?” Sam said. “I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Oh, no, not with that gunshot wound. Jolene should have stayed in bed.”
“Are you talking about Jolene Rutherford?” Charlie asked. “Jolene Rutherford got shot?”
“Stuart said it was nothing, but I could see — the look on Jolene’s face — it hurt.”
Charlie had frozen as solid as a block of ice at the mention of the name.
“Stuart …” Charlie gasped out the question, “McClintock?”
“Big football player like that, of course it wouldn’t hurt him, but poor little Jolene …”
Sam’s mind was racing, staggering and stumbling, trying to put it all together. Jolene Rutherford. Pete’s daughter. Pete … who had communicated with Stuart McClintock using stickpins on his map on Monday. The map Pete said this morning was missing. Were Stuart and Jolene with Cotton Jackson? On the outside, the three of them together there? Talking to Becky Sue Potter … a dead Becky Sue Potter with a dead baby?
“Jolene should have stayed in bed like the old lady Cotton talked to in that nursing home.”
Cotton’s wife, Thelma, had told them she’d talked to the Witch of Gideon’s daughter in a nursing home.
“Cotton Jackson, Jolene Rutherford and Stuart McClintock?” Malachi demanded. “Is that who you’re talking about?”
Moses Weiss nodded his head but it might not have been a response to Malachi’s question.
“They’re going to face down the monster. Main Street in Gideon. High Noon.”
“What monster?” Malachi asked.
This time the old man answered. Maybe. Or maybe the word just happened to be the next one lined up by his randomly firing synapses.
“Jabberwock.”
Then a look of such utter terror stamped itself on the old man’s face that it knocked the breath out of the other three. His eyes moved like a frightened rabbit’s, seeing something their eyes could not.
“No, please, no, don’t take me!” He shook his head frantically. “Forget it all. Never happened. Please.”
Then he screamed. Shrieked. Wailed.
The sound was as fierce and abrupt as a single bleat of a police siren and then was instantly cut off. His mouth kept working, though, screaming silently. And he wet himself.
Chapter Six
Charlie went next door to the ravaged Dollar General Store, dug around in the piles of discarded merchandise, and came back with a box of adult diapers. Malachi looked profoundly grateful. He got the old man into one, covered it with a borrowed pair of E.J.’s sweatpants, and parked Moses in the waiting room, babbling nonsense.
Now, she sat with Malachi, Sam and Pete in Rusty’s not-hospital room, trying to process, make some sense of it all.
“You’re saying my Jolene was … shot,” Pete asked. He had been thunderstruck when they told him what the dithered old man had said, and that they believed Pete’s daughter was with Cotton Jackson and Stuart — Stuart! — outside, and that they were doing there the same things the four of them were doing in Rusty’s room. Trying to figure it out, trying to do something about it.
“That’s what the old guy said,” Malachi said. “But it wasn’t a bad wound. He said she shouldn’t have gone with them to see Becky Sue Potter, should have stayed behind. But she didn’t so she was obviously not hurt that bad, even if it did hurt.”
“Jolene, here.” Pete was having trouble fitting it into his head. “Shot? Who shot her … and why?” They all shrugged.
“We just got random information, whatever the old guy babbled,” Malachi said.
“She came here. Why would …?”
“For the same reason Stuart came,” Charlie said. “And Cotton Jackson. They’re looking for us, trying to find us. I’d be wil
ling to bet what they found in the whole county was what that little girl Lily Topple found when she went back into Gideon after she ran away from home. Everybody gone. Every house empty.”
“And she said it,” Sam said, excited to fit a little piece into the puzzle. “She said there was nothing left in the houses except what was on the walls. That would make sense, then, wouldn’t it. Pete’s map. Your mother’s blackboard. They’d still be over there on that side … the outside.”
“Following that train of thought — both of those things got moved last night. The map and the blackboard,” Malachi said. “You don’t suppose …
He let it dangle and Sam finished his sentence.
“Maybe they moved them. Jolene and Stuart and Cotton. Maybe they took down the blackboard and the map and moved them.”
“What for?” Pete said.
That question hung out there unanswered.
“And where’d they put my map? Why didn’t they bring it here? And, why’d they bring the blackboard here? What for?”
Nobody had an answer for those questions either and the conversation faltered, then Malachi let out a long breath.
“Okay, let’s regroup. What do we know now that we didn’t know before?” He held up one finger. “There are people out there searching for us, trying to … do something about the Jabberwock just like we are.” He held up a second finger. “And we know they’re going to Gideon today, at noon today, to … confront it somehow. To challenge it.”
“And your point?” Charlie asked.
“I think we have to be there when they do.”
That was a conversation stopper.
“We’ve danced around and around this. We know—“
“Believe—” Charlie countered.
“Know that the Jabberwock has come … out of hiding, out of hibernation, out of—”
“Like a cicada?” Pete put in, but Malachi didn’t pause to respond.
“It’s here because the three of us are here.” Malachi was adamant. “And we know what Abby said, that it won’t leave until it gets what it wants.”
