by Ronald Kelly
Boyd laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’ve got troubles, all right. Plenty of ’em.”
The farmer waited, but Boyd refused to give any details. “I don’t want to sound pushy, Boyd,” he said, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground, “but I need that casket there, and I need it as soon as I can get it.”
Boyd turned and stared at the man. “Why, Dud? Why do you have to have it so soon?”
Dud was at a loss for an answer at first. Then one came to mind. “I’ve been feeling right poorly lately,” he said. He pressed a hand to his stomach, as if a pain had flared up in his gut. “Just wanted to have it waiting for me, in case something was to happen.”
Boyd sighed and eyed the casket, gauging the work that had to be done. “Well, Dud, it’s gonna be a while longer. I’ve still got to finish building the thing, then make the lid and put in the hinges. After that I’m going to rub in some linseed oil. Maybe put a little urethane epoxy in the cracks to make it waterproof. You do want it waterproofed, don’t you?”
Dud didn’t care one way or the other, but he didn’t want to raise Boyd’s suspicions. “Yeah, sure I do.”
“Then it’s probably gonna be day after tomorrow before it’s ready.”
Alarm shown in Dud’s eyes. “Day after tomorrow! Can’t you have it for me sooner than that?”
The carpenter looked annoyed. “No, I can’t, Dud.” He looked at the oak box with a scowl on his face. “To tell the truth, I don’t know why I agreed to build the damned thing in the first place. I mean, it’s a coffin, for Christ’s sake! I must be hard up for money, doing a job like this!”
Dud could sense that Boyd’s heart wasn’t in his work, that his mind was preoccupied with whatever trouble had him down in the dumps. He also sensed that Boyd was on the verge of handing him his money back and canceling the order. He didn’t want that to happen, though. For his own sake, he needed that casket, no matter how long it took.
“I’m not trying to rush you, Boyd,” Dud told him. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the dwindling bank roll. “And I’ll pay you some extra to finish it up, if you want.”
Boyd eyed the money in the farmer’s hand, then shook his head. “I don’t want any more of your money, Dud,” he told him. “We had a deal and I aim to stick to it. I’m just bitching to hear myself bitch, that’s all.”
Dud returned the roll of bills to the pocket of his overalls. “So, day after tomorrow, you say?”
Boyd nodded. “Yeah. I’ll have it ready for sure. You got my word on it.”
“Then I’ll see you Thursday,” said Dud. He turned and headed back to his truck.
Once he had backed out of the driveway and onto the rural stretch of Maple Creek Road, Dud Craven took a deep breath, wondering what Grandpappy would have to say about the delay. He was afraid to even guess. The casket Grandpappy had spent the last nine-and-a-half decades in was in sorry shape. The wood was rotted and the nails were pulling free from their holes. It wouldn’t be long before the coffin was no more than a pile of dry-rotted oak.
Dud just hoped Grandpappy didn’t take it out on him. If he did, Dud might end up dead or, even worse, like Wendell Craven. The thought sent a shudder of revulsion through the mountain farmer. If he had his choice in the matter, he would pick death hands down.
“What a mess!” grumbled Stan Watts. “What a godawful mess!”
“Sure is,” said John Prichard. The county coroner knelt next to a man with a slit throat. The incision was so deep that the neck bone was exposed. “Been a long time since I’ve seen a bloodbath like this. Maybe that mass shooting in that restaurant over in Harrisburg. But there was only three killed in that one.”
The police chief remembered the case Prichard was talking about. A waitress’s jealous boyfriend had come in at lunchtime and unloaded a 9mm pistol at the dining room. Three customers had been killed, including a six-year-old girl. Five others were wounded before someone got up the nerve to tackle the guy. The waitress he’d gone there to shoot hadn’t even been on duty at the time.
But this was worse, much worse. Seven people were dead, six men and one woman. No shots had been fired. One had suffered a broken neck, three had had their skulls completely shattered, and one’s throat had been laid open. The bartender of the Cheating Heart, Vernon Smith, had been found behind the bar with his chest sunken in like someone had caved it in with a sledgehammer.
Stan walked over to the most puzzling one of all, big Buford Jones. “Are you sure about old Buford here?” he asked Prichard again. “I mean, he just wasn’t the type to do such a thing.”
“Oh, it was a suicide, I’m certain about that,” the medical examiner told him. “A strange one, to be sure, but he did it himself. Drove that knife right up into his heart and kept at it until he was dead.”
The chief looked down at Buford’s face. His eyes bugged out of the sockets and his mouth was wide open, like he had been screaming. “Looks like he was scared shitless,” he said.
Prichard nodded. “I’d say the same for most of them here. Whatever took place in this bar last night, it must have been one hell of a show.”
Officer King walked up, looking pasty-faced, as usual. He held something dangling on the end of a pen. “Look what I found,” he said.
Stan looked at it for a moment. “What the hell is it?”
“Well, it was a Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum,” said the law officer. “Now it ain’t nothing but a paperweight.”
The police chief couldn’t believe his eyes. King was right. It was a Magnum revolver. The trigger guard that looped around the lawman’s pen was the only part of it that was recognizable. “Has it been fired?”
“One round. But whatever it hit, it didn’t slow it down.” King looked around the barroom. “What do you think did this, Chief?”
Stan shrugged. “John, what’s your call?”
Prichard looked just as puzzled as they were. “There’s enough bloodshed here to indicate five or six suspects, maybe even more.” He paused for a second. “But if you want to know the truth, I’ll tell you.”
“I’m listening,” said Stan.
“All the forensic evidence points to only one conclusion, no matter how improbable it might seem.” He looked around at the seven bodies that lay on the blood-splattered floor. “It may sound crazy, but only one person did this.”
The police chief laughed. It was a nervous laugh. “Aw, come on, John…”
“You asked my opinion, and that’s it,” he said. “I’ll know for sure once I do the autopsies.” He shook his head. “You know, retirement hasn’t looked this good in a long time.”
Stan motioned toward the front door. “Let’s go out and get some air, okay?” he suggested.
“That’d suit me just fine,” said the coroner.
Once they were outside, they stood in the sunshine and breathed in deeply, trying to clear the nasty odor of blood and death from their nostrils. “What a week this has been,” said Stan with a sigh. “This hasn’t been a crime spree. It’s been a frigging flood!” He turned to the coroner. “I’ve been meaning to ask you… have you found Jamie Bell’s body yet?”
“No,” said Prichard. “We turned the entire hospital upside down. She simply isn’t there.”
“I heard that the Bells raised a ruckus.”
“Can you blame them? Anyway, they’re threatening to sue both the hospital and yours truly,” he said, looking much older than he had on Sunday morning. “You still haven’t uncovered anything concrete at the murder scene?”
“Hell, no! And we’ve turned up a blank on the missing preacher, too. I can’t even get a hold of Craven’s wife. She won’t answer the phone, and I drove by early this morning. The house is locked up tighter than a drum. I just hope she went to Knoxville to stay with her folks.” He thought of Buford Jones. “I’d hate to think of her doing something stupid. Wendell was a son-of-a-bitch, but she loved the jerk.”
“Bill was telling me something about a car you found out on 321 this morning,�
�� said the coroner.
“Yeah—that, too. Bill was on patrol when he came across this car that had a flat tire. There was no one in it, but there was blood on the dash and on the windshield. And a tire had been shot out. We found double-ought pellets embedded in the tread and the wheel rim. Looked like someone shot at the car from the side of the road.”
“And you found no body?”
“Nothing, except for the blood, and then only a few drops,” said Stan.
Prichard scratched his head. “Like with Jamie Bell?” he asked.
“Yeah, and the pine grove next to the Baptist church.” Stan looked at the coroner. “Do you think there’s a connection?”
“There might be,” he replied. “There might even be a connection to what happened here.” He nodded toward the Cheating Heart. “But not as far as blood is concerned. There’s enough bloodshed in there for a dozen murder scenes.”
“What’s going on here, John? Just what the hell is going on?”
Prichard was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his eyes were grim. “Stan, I think we’ve got a very dangerous individual on our hands. One without a shred of decency or conscience. Not a serial killer; there’s no pattern. Maybe something a hell of a lot worse, though.”
“Yeah. I hate to admit it, but I think you’re right,” said Stan. “Ready to go back in?”
“Not really,” said the coroner. “But I reckon that’s what they pay us for.”
“I’m beginning to wonder about that,” said the police chief, as they headed back to the beer joint. They had a lot of work to do before the Cheating Heart stopped looking like a slaughterhouse and started looking like a honky-tonk again.
Chapter Twenty-One
“It’ll all be for the best, darling,” said Blanche Craven. “You’ll see.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Joan. She sat in the passenger seat of her mother’s car. They had gone to the Piggly Wiggly in town to do some grocery shopping, leaving the kids home with a babysitter. It had taken longer than they’d expected. It was nearly nine o’clock.
They had been discussing Joan’s appointment with her lawyer, James Adkins, at two o’clock the following afternoon. He was supposed to advise her on things like alimony, child custody, and the division of property. Then, after she had decided exactly what she wanted, he would begin drawing up divorce papers.
Joan was having second thoughts. She knew Boyd drove her crazy with his drinking and the impulsive things he did, but she also wondered if she wasn’t being too hard on him. She recalled what he had said the night before and the frustration that had been in his voice. She had been too angry to listen to him then, but now that she had cooled down, it bothered her. Was she being unfair? Was she listening too much to what her mother had to say and not enough to her own heart?
She looked over at Blanche as the woman put on her turning signal and pulled the Toyota onto the rural stretch of Stantonview Road. Her mother could be a real pain in the ass sometimes. She was pushy and overly opinionated. She could also be very obnoxious and vindictive, particularly toward the opposite sex. Joan couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s constant nagging and criticism hadn’t contributed to her father’s stroke four years before. Leonard Craven had been a quiet, good-natured man who would rather avoid conflict than face it head on. Blanche was just the opposite. Joan could only recall a few times when her mother had shown her father any type of affection, be it a kiss or a hug. Mostly, she had been on his case about one stupid thing or another, like mowing the lawn or painting the house. When his ulcers surfaced and his health began to go downhill, Blanche hadn’t let up. She’d kept at him day and night. He had died of a massive stroke six months later. Blanche claimed that he had been calmly sitting in his favorite chair, reading the Sunday paper. But Joan couldn’t help but wonder if Blanche hadn’t been throwing one of her nasty little fits and her father hadn’t been able to take it anymore.
Her mother had never liked Boyd. Even when Joan and he were dating, she’d had plenty to say against him. Blanche had griped about his bad reputation, the kind of unstable work he did, and anything else negative she could come up with. Her criticism was one thing that pushed Joan into marriage earlier than she’d planned. She was still living at home with her parents and Blanche’s constant bad-mouthing of Boyd had made her decision more than anything else. When Boyd had asked her to marry him, she had agreed, insisting that they drive to Gatlinburg as soon as possible. She had left her parents out of it completely. Her father had understood, but Blanche never had. She still had nasty things to say about her simple wedding ceremony in the mountain chapel. She acted as if it had been a personal insult aimed directly at her. Secretly, Joan wondered if maybe her mother was right. Maybe she had run off and gotten married to pay Blanche back for the difficulty she had caused her and her father over the years.
Joan also wondered if she had let down her defenses too far following that incident with Boyd in December. She had allowed her mother to move into the house, thinking she would be a big help with the kids. But all she had done was run her mouth. She constantly put down Boyd and pointed out his shortcomings, making them seem larger than they actually were. Joan had been hurt and confused by Boyd’s behavior, and that, in turn, had made her a little more vulnerable than she would have liked. Her mother had spotted her weakness and gone in for the kill. During the past three months, Blanche had steadily turned Boyd Andrews from an unemployed carpenter with a drinking problem into a cruel drunkard who didn’t give a damn about his family. It had taken a while, but Joan had eventually swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
As she sat in the dark car, Joan began to think that she was on the verge of making a horrible mistake. She recalled Bessie’s tears and Paul’s shocked face, as well as the tormented look in Boyd’s eyes before he’d walked out the kitchen door. And it had all been because she had spoken the unspeakable, issued the ultimate threat: divorce. It was a word Blanche had been pounding into her head for the past three months, but one she had never dared to utter herself… until yesterday. And all because she had lost her temper.
Joan was about to tell Blanche that she was having second thoughts when a glare illuminated the interior of the car. She turned in her seat and looked out the back window. There was a vehicle behind them, barely three car lengths away, and it had its high beams on.
“Asshole!” said Blanche. She eased on her brakes, hoping to put a little scare into the driver and cause him to back off.
But it didn’t work. The vehicle slowed a little, then sped up, closing the distance between them until it was only fifteen feet away.
“What’s their problem?” asked Joan.
“They’re being a damned jerk, that’s what!” growled Blanche. She pressed on the gas, sending the car speeding down the narrow country road. The one following them also increased its speed. The high beams grew closer, filling the Toyota with bright light.
“You know what?” asked Blanche, squinting into the rearview mirror. “That’s a blamed pickup truck back there… and I think it’s your drunk of a husband.”
Joan turned around and looked. “Boyd? Now, why would you think he’d do something like that, Mama?”
“Just being mean, I’d say,” said the old woman. “He’s trying to put a scare into us. Intimidate us.”
“But why?”
Blanche laughed. “After last night? You’re not that naive, Joan!”
Joan was beginning to get scared. “Speed up again, Mama. I’m going to take a look out the side window.” Blanche floored the gas pedal again, sending the foreign car jetting along the dark road. Joan rolled down her window and stuck her head out. She peered against the blinding headlights and finally made out the vehicle past the glare. She pulled her head in and sat back in her seat.
“Well?” demanded her mother.
“It’s not Boyd,” she said, relieved but still frightened. “The truck is a lot older than his Ford, and it’s gray. I don’t know who it is.”
<
br /> “Well, whoever it is, they’re getting on my last nerve!” said Blanche. “Wish I could get behind them and get a look at their license plate. I’d have Stan Watts on their ass before they knew what hit them.”
Joan rolled her eyes. Every threat her mother uttered seemed to involve Stan Watts, as if she had the Green Hollow police chief in her hip pocket. As far as Joan knew, Stan couldn’t even stand Blanche, the same as most everyone else in town.
The truck increased its speed, putting only a yard’s distance between it and the Toyota.
“Tailgating bastard!” yelled Blanche, her eyes full of rage. “I’ve got half a mind to slam on my brakes!”
Joan glanced at the speedometer. It was hovering between sixty and sixty-five. “You do and you’ll get us both killed!”
They drove on another half mile. Three more miles of rural road lay between them and home. Joan turned and looked out the back window. A dark form seemed to emerge from the bed of the truck, topping its cab and skimming across its hood. It flashed in front of the truck’s headlights and headed straight for the rear window of Blanche’s car.
“Mama!” she screamed.
“What?” snapped Blanche. Then the rear window shattered inward, spraying tiny bits of safety glass throughout the interior of the Camry.
Joan saw something dark drop onto the back seat, flailing and flapping. Then it launched itself at the space between the driver and passenger seats.
Blanche craned her head around just as the thing emerged above the center console. It was a crow or a raven, pitch black with tiny red eyes. It gave a loud caw, then attacked the woman. Blanche screamed shrilly as its dark beak pecked her squarely in the right eye. The sharp tip pierced her eyeball with a wet pop, sending streamers of blood and fluid over the headrest and the side of the seat.
Joan reached out to grab the bird, but it pecked at her hands, slashing deep gashes across her palms. Blanche had turned her head away, but the crow refused to stop its attack. It kept cawing and pecking, tearing fragments from Blanche’s ear and flaying ribbons of flesh from the side of her neck.
