by Ninie Hammon
He went over the plan for the umpteen bazillionth time in his head. As soon as Viola started talking, he was to swing around, put the barrel of the rifle through the slot on the facade and sight in on a target. Only about six inches of the barrel would be visible from below, and Pete was banking on the fact that the crowd would be facing the other way, everybody’s attention would be focused on Viola, not looking over their shoulders at the roofline behind them. But whoever stood up on the school porch with Viola was facing the drug store and hair salon buildings. If they looked close, they’d see. Nothing to be done about that, though. It was what it was.
As soon as Lester shot Viola, Pete would yell for them to surrender and if they didn’t … when they didn’t, he and Pete would open fire.
Judd found he suddenly needed to go to the bathroom. Fine time to notice a thing like that! He wondered what soldiers in battle did … how did they …? He let it go, might ask Pete or Lester about it when this was all over. Assuming all three of them were still alive by then.
The point of using his Browning and Pete’s M1 was because they both sounded like cannons. Pete wanted the sound to distract Viola’s troops from guarding the crowd, wanted them occupied with … returning fire.
Judd hadn’t never in his life experienced the particular tingle at the base of his spine occasioned by the realization that any second now, somebody was going to start shooting at him.
Viola and her sons done like she done the night of the last public meeting, where she’d got rid of the deputy sheriff. She come into West Liberty Middle School through a door on the north side that opened into a space beside the building you couldn’t see from the street. Everybody else was parked in front and was milling around in the crowd that was already pretty good-sized and the party wasn’t scheduled to start until noon. When it did, her plan was to get to the point quick. Zach and the Monroe brothers, Bubba and Felix, Clarence Thacker, Hoyt Wilmer, Jethro Bodean and another couple of fellas would be in the street on the north side of the crowd, making sure didn’t nobody “wander off.” Obie, the Scully brothers, Bufford Pettigrew, Hulan Gibson, Merl Pickett and some others would be on the south side, doing the same thing there. She’d keep Neb with her.
She didn’t even make no effort to hide her gun when she come walking in through the little door beside the stage in the auditorium. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 66 .357 magnum with a six-inch barrel. A revolver with six chambers. It was a heavy weapon, not the kind of pistol most females woulda chose, but she was a strong woman and she liked the heft of it.
Soon’s they walked into the room, she spotted the crowd of people standing in front of something on the back wall. When Viola got close, she could see it was a giant map of Nowhere County.
Where in tarnation did a thing like that come from?
She shoved her way through the babbling crowd until she was standing right in front of it, and she was as floored as everybody else seemed to be at the detail shown. She seen Scott’s Ridge, the bat caves in Bugtussel Hollow and the spot where there usta be a bridge on old Rabbit Run Road. But there was also a mark that showed that little spring uphill from her house that didn’t even have no name. It only come out in the springtime, dried up in the summer and run again soon’s the weather got damp in the fall. She didn’t think there was a soul in the world had ever seen that thing whose last name wasn’t Tackett. Obviously, everybody else standing around was as taken with the map as she was, babbling about this little detail and that, commenting how they hadn’t realized how many unique things they was in the county until they seen all of them together like that, drawn out on the map.
“Who done this and what’s it doing here?” she asked nobody in particular. Somebody said they’d heard somebody else say they thought the person drew it was Pete Rutherford, which would make sense, she supposed, him being a mailman all them years, he’d know what was located where. But to be able to remember it all, all them little things … that was something.
But Viola Tackett hadn’t come to town today to admire a map of Nowhere County. She had other business, and she called out to them as was gathered around the map to go on outside to the street so she could talk to everybody proper. Most did, but a handful hung out at the map, and other folks was coming in the front door to see it when she walked out on the porch. She’d get Neb to gather up all the stragglers soon as she got the meeting going.
Squinting up into the almost noonday sun, Viola stood on the high porch in front of the leaded glass window beside the school door — both the left and the right double doors had been propped open. She looked out over the people who’d gathered there in the middle of the street. Hard to know how many folks was there. They was packed tight and more was coming up and filling in all the time. She’d had Zach make it plain on the phone tree message that “every adult” who showed up would have their name put on the list, so if they was a big family living up in a hollow, they’d best bring all the aunts, uncles and brothers, so everybody would get a share.
She looked at her watch. She still had a couple of minutes and she planned to start right on time. High noon.
Little kids was running around, chasing each other and making a racket. Her first feeling of annoyance — she never liked to be around little kids — was replaced with gratitude. Good thing to have some kids. Put a gun to one of them’s head, they parents would fall all over themselves to save their skins, plead with they neighbors and the like.
The midday sun hung right dead overhead. Wasn’t hot, though, course not. Hadn’t been hot since J-Day. Not a cloud in the sky, neither. They was folks complaining about how good the weather was, how unnatural good and uniform it was, but she wasn’t one of them as didn’t like it. It’d be fine with her if every day from now on was just as clear and comfortably warm as this one. She put her hand over her eyes to shade them, surveying the crowd and—
Something glinted and caught her eye. There was something shiny on the roof of Willingham’s Drug Store on the other side of the street about half a block down from the school.
Then it was gone. She kept looking. It blinked again and was gone. Sunlight was reflecting off something shiny. The sparkle made her uneasy in the way other things in her life had done, and though she didn’t understand it, she never questioned the feeling.
She called Obie to her side and spoke in his ear without gesturing.
“Climb up on the roof of the drug store and see what’s up there that’s sparkling.”
Chapter Eighteen
If Cotton hadn’t known there was a cemetery here, Stuart would have driven right past it. Piloting his rented red Lexus around one hairpin turn and then another, he was concentrated on the road and unprepared when Cotton told him to pull over.
“Where?”
“There.” Cotton indicated the ghost of a trail leaving the highway on the left side and winding back into the trees. As Stuart began to slow down, Cotton pointed down the highway ahead of them. “Around that next turn is Gideon. The first house probably isn’t half a mile from here.” Stuart pulled off onto the almost-not-there trail and ventured slowly along its rocky surface and Cotton gestured at the steep hillside snuggled up to it on the right side. “The town’s just on the other side of that hill.”
The Gideon cemetery boasted no sign or any landmark to mark its presence. It was an overgrown area about half the size of a football field between two steep inclines, next to a meadow carpeted in colorful wildflowers that had butterflies flitting around from one blossom to the next. Stuart felt anew the sensation he’d felt when he’d first driven the winding mountain roads — the vistas, drop-offs and lush green mountains were breathtaking, but more subtle beauty like this meadow seemed to be around every corner, too. In the Detroit neighborhood where Stuart had grown up, the only bright colors were provided by graffiti, gang logos and “colorful obscenities” painted on the gray tenement buildings.
One glance at the other two and he knew he was the only one who had noticed it. When Stuart killed th
e engine and got out, he could actually hear what he thought might be a hive of bees somewhere. There were a couple of tree stumps in the meadow, almost covered by the flowers and grass — maybe there were bees in one of them.
“This is it, huh,” Jolene said. She was seated in the back seat and didn’t get out.
Cotton told Stuart, “There are little cemeteries like this all over the mountains, a few graves here, a few there. Families and neighbors take care of them.”
Obviously, nobody’d been caring for this one. Stuart looked uneasily up into the surrounding woods and Cotton caught the look.
“The phrase you’re searching for is sitting ducks,” Cotton said, then he said something else, softly. “Some ducks have teeth.”
That couldn’t be right. Stuart’s mind was so numb from exhaustion, Cotton could as easily have said “some trucks have wreaths,” or “some pucks have grief” and it would have made as much sense. Stuart was too tired to ask, just looked up into the thick brush and the deep shadows of the huge trees. If you knew what you were doing, you could be hidden in plain sight right there in front of him and the city boy wouldn’t spot you.
Stuart could pick out occasional grave markers where vegetation hadn’t completely taken over. Closer inspection yielded some semblance of order, what might once have been neat rows of markers under the extending arms of a huge sycamore tree near the south edge of the meadow.
Stepping to the nearest marker that lay on its side in the undergrowth, he pulled it free from the grass and entangling vines and dusted off the front side of the stone. Or maybe it was the back side. There was no way to tell because any words inscribed there had worn off long before Stuart was born.
“Lily Topple kept up the cemetery as best she could,” Cotton said. “Probably some of her kin was buried here. Rose did the same after her. But these people died more than a hundred years ago, and when all the residents of Gideon vanished overnight, that left nobody to see to the graves.”
Stepping to another stone lying in the undergrowth, Stuart freed it and tried to make out the words inscribed on it. All he could see for sure was the date “June” — either the birth or death month. But the year and everything else had worn away. Another toppled stone bore the family name McTavish, or McIntosh, so there must have been some Scots sprinkled among the Irish miners in the coal camp.
Cotton indicated a bare space between the headstones that might once have been a walkway or path. “How about we dig here?” Cotton almost grinned. “The royal We, meaning You, of course.”
They had made something of a plan last night. Jolene and Cotton would drop Stuart at the cemetery on their way to Gideon. He would dig a grave and set up the “marker” while Cotton and Jolene went into town to retrieve the bones — if, indeed, the bones were still where Lily Topple had put them a hundred years ago.
Stuart went back to the car, hit the button on the key fob and the trunk unlocked. He lifted the lid and found the tools Cotton had purchased yesterday at Home Depot in Carlisle, picks and shovels, a flashlight and three sets of work gloves. And the wooden grave marker.
They’d made the marker last night. It had taken longer to decide what words to inscribe on it than it had to construct the small cross. Cotton had purchased wide black Magic Markers. Jolene had the clearest handwriting. Unlike the square, all-caps Stuart or Cotton would have printed, hers was fluid cursive that looked almost like calligraphy.
Truth was, they knew almost nothing about the bones that had been in the burial cave the miners had accidentally cut into. Since the mining company supervisor had assumed they had been Quakers — Christians — Stuart and Cotton had constructed a cross. But even that was just a guess. So they’d written on the marker as little as possible.
Jolene penned the words “Carthage, Kentucky, 1795” in large letters on the top. Beneath that, she wrote: “May these children of God rest here in eternal peace.”
Stuart glanced again at the surrounding woods.
“If they’re up there, you won’t see them,” Cotton said.
“Figured that.”
The two men stood, looking at each other for a beat, then Cotton put his hand on Stuart’s shoulder.
Neither spoke. Stuart knew his voice would be thick with emotion if he did, but Cotton merely nodded then, turned and went back to the car. He got in on the driver’s side, adjusted the seat forward — he didn’t have Stuart’s long legs, then turned the car around and headed back down the not-quite-a-trail toward the road. Jolene looked at Stuart through the backseat window, the expression on her face unreadable. He was glad she didn’t wave.
As soon as the sound of the car engine died away, Stuart became aware of the sounds of the woods. Birds calling out to each other, a dozen different varieties. A raucous cry came from the bushes, courtesy of a what sounded like huge cicadas — which Stuart understood only came out every seven years. Or fourteen. Or maybe it was twenty-one — at some regular interval, anyway. Clearly, with the ruckus they put up, this was their year to shine.
He put on the work gloves, lifted the pick high above his head and hammered it with a crunching thud into the earth at his feet. The contact was jarring, but gratefully the ground wasn’t hard and the point sunk deep into the earth. Even in soft ground, digging a grave big enough to hold two duffle bags full of bones would take a while.
Concentrating on expending all his strength with every blow, he hacked at the dirt, keeping his mind fixed on landing every stroke in the same spot as the one before, driving the point of the pick as deep as he could. He refused to look up at the woods all around him.
If they’re up there, you won’t see them.
Chapter Nineteen
Charlie’d volunteered to drive the three of them from the Middle of Nowhere to Fearsome Hollow, to Gideon where the wild things are.
Sam insisted Malachi ride in front because his long legs would be jammed up in the backseat, but in truth Sam’s six-foot frame didn’t fold up very well in Charlie’s mother’s 1991 Honda Legend, either.
Charlie’s mind flashed briefly to the Chrysler Cirrus she’d rented at the airport in Lexington, wondering idly what had happened to it. What had happened to all the vehicles that just vanished when they hit the county line.
“You can put that stuff in the back,” she instructed Malachi when he opened the car door and saw resting on the seat the envelop of information Thelma Jackson had brought to show them two days ago. “I intended to go through it, see if maybe there was something, but I just never …”
Malachi picked up the envelope and sat down. As she pulled out of the parking space, he opened it and idly fingered through the contents. Copies of birth and death certificates, of “chits” for merchandise sold at the store in Boonesborough before the Revolutionary War, family tree charts, the list of names from the Bible Thelma found in Shakertown, copies of ledger entries, letters like the one where someone had set down the memories of the trapper Jeb Pollock, who went looking for a crying child in the woods and found “a beastie twenty feet tall, teeth sharp as knives,” or Aloushous Hardy, the minister who claimed the devil “his own self came to carry me away to hell. Its teeth were daggers and its eyes were full of lost souls.”
When she turned on Pebble Bottom Road and headed toward Byrne Lane and Zebulon Pike, she glanced at Malachi’s face and realized he wasn’t really looking at any of the pages on his lap.
His mind was somewhere else entirely. She couldn’t fit it into her head what it must be like to find out you have a son … and, oh, by the way, the boy might die before you ever have a chance to have a conversation with him.
Sam sat silent in the back seat. Charlie didn’t speak either. All of them were as imprisoned by their own thoughts as the county was by the sinister mirage on the county line.
Merrie.
Stuart!
Stuart had been here. No, was still here, at least in some “here” that approximated Nowhere County somewhere in the universe. He’d come looking for her. And she
would bask in the warmth of that, not let the cold of other realities chill her. If she ever saw him again … when she saw him again, there would be time and space for all the rest of it. Not now. Right now, Charlie concentrated on the truth as she knew it to be. Sometime this morning, Stuart had written a message to Merrie on the chalkboard in the waiting room of the clinic. He was here right now, searching for her.
And if Moses Weiss was to be believed, he would be in Fearsome Hollow today, too. High noon. Fighting the Jabberwock to free his wife and little girl.
She tried to allow that reality, like the heat from a single red coal in a fireplace, to warm her and keep at bay the terror. And the agony of leaving Merrie.
She suddenly realized there were tears running down her cheeks. She reached up and wiped them away. Malachi hadn’t noticed. His head was bent to the papers in his lap but there was a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. It didn’t surprise her that when she glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw that Sam’s cheeks were wet, too. When she rounded the final curve into Fearsome Hollow, she looked fearfully up into the trees. The last time she had been here, when she and Malachi had come with the Tungate brothers to look for Abner, she’d spotted puffs of white, like mini clouds, clustered in the trees on the mountainsides around them.
