The Devil Walks in Mattingly

by Billy Coffey

  Yes, people were bad. They did mean things like hurt other people and make mommas and daddies fight and pull on pretty girls’ pigtails. They made you take the cap gun you kept hung from a peg on your bedroom wall and slip it under your pillow.

  Zach knew that sometimes people died too, and sometimes that was because of bad people and sometimes not. He had two grandmas and one granddaddy in heaven. The other granddaddy—the one who’d once carried Bessie—had gone little mentioned in Zach Barnett’s life, and whatever questions he’d posed had been met with silence on the part of his parents. That granddaddy had become a Secret, and Zach knew secrets happened whenever there was something bad to be hidden. But even if Zach was ignorant of the machinations of the world, he understood when one and one equaled two. He could come and go anywhere in town he wished and talk to anyone he had the notion to, but Zach’s parents never let him near the phone when Mr. Justus started calling. And whenever the Barnett family was out to the Dairy Queen for supper or the carnival or church and Mr. Justus’s name was mentioned, Zach’s momma and daddy were always quick to shush and head on.

  It was a surprising thing for Zach to hit on, even as young as he was—his folks had been trying to keep a secret so bad they’d given that secret away long before Mr. Justus called Zach’s daddy “son.”

  Zach didn’t know why he wasn’t allowed to speak to Mr. Justus or what exactly Mr. Justus had done to get himself kicked out of the town, but he figured it had to be something bad. He’d heard his momma say once that Mr. Justus was headed for h-e-double hockey sticks when his time came. And that was the problem. Because Mr. Justus had to be a real bad man to end up there, had maybe even hated Jesus, and if that was true then it meant the bad in him was also in Zach’s daddy and also in Zach himself.

  That nugget of insight made him shudder beneath the covers.

  But Zach thought his daddy was a good man, the best man. He was sheriff of the whole town, and everybody loved him. And he thought his momma was the best woman too. She helped people and had taught him to do the same, had even let him help her with her names. That was the second best thing in the world to Zach (throwing Bessie, of course, topped that list), and he’d grown to understand that real joy meant not getting from people but giving to them. That was the lesson his momma taught. “Doing for others who can’t do for themselves is like digging for treasure, Zach,” she’d often said. “It makes the bad inside feel better.”

  Zach thought on that and on all those good things he’d done with his momma and daddy, and he really did feel better. Yet there in the cool silence of the night, he also considered that his father had been acting different lately, like something was wrong. He’d tried to hide it, but Zach could see (and could hear as well, some of the screams those last nights had made it to his sleeping ears) that Jake Barnett was sick, and from more than just not sleeping.

  He’d seen, too, that his momma’s lesson about helping others was one she’d maybe forgotten. Getting those names and gathering up those boxes didn’t make her smile so much anymore, and Zach couldn’t understand why. It was like his momma was still trying to dig for treasure, but she was heaping all the dirt she dug up on top of herself.

  Zach’s last thought before closing his eyes was a prayer that he would open them to sunshine. He bolted upright not ten minutes later when he heard his father hollering and his mother saying it was okay. Zach saw a shadow cast on the white hallway wall. He wanted to call out, ask if that shadow was his mother or his father, but when he tried he could only produce a whisper. He reached for the cap gun under his pillow and pulled back the covers.

  The shadow was still there, unmoving, almost as if it were waiting. For him. The muscles in Zach’s face and arms tensed as he stepped around the toy town on the floor, wanting to say, Momma is that you, please tell me that’s you and please tell me what’s wrong with Daddy because I don’t know what’s happening to us and to everyone. He reached the open bedroom door. Zach’s eyes followed the shadow to its source. The cap gun went limp in his hand.

  His father had been dreaming. Zach understood this, and then he understood something else—the thing standing in front of him was what had brought that dream. The fear that fell over Zach wasn’t from the way it looked or what it said, it was more a knowing that this was something he wasn’t supposed to be seeing, that maybe no one was supposed to see.

  And yet children hold their souls close and have not yet learned how to forget them, and so see it Zach Barnett did. Magic comes easy to children. It’s only when they grow up that believing gets harder.

  The boy Zach saw was not much older than himself and staring back at him. He wore a dirty pair of cut-off jeans and looked out from behind a broken pair of horn-rimmed glasses. The boy pulled back the hood of his sweatshirt and lifted his chin. Zach wanted to cry out. He would have if the boy’s smile had not stilled him.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The boy brought a single finger to his lips.

  Another secret, Zach thought. Something bad to hide.

  He gave a promise that he would be quiet. But what Zach received wasn’t a secret at all. It was the voice of heaven filling his mind.

  Part V

  Remember True

  1

  I decided the next morning that the front door of the sheriff’s office really could use another coat of paint. The outside first, as that was the side everyone saw. The inside—the part only Kate and I had to look at—could be saved for later. Looking back, I suppose there’s not a little irony in such thinking.

  I’d put two coats on that door the week before. Friday, that had been. I’d taken Kate up to the Lowe’s in Stanley (Kate had always been good at picking colors), and we’d held hands the whole way there and back. She never asked about my dreams and I never thought they were anything more than guilt.

  Yes, that had been Friday. The day before Eric Thayer had died and Andy got burned and Timmy was beaten, before Charlie Givens got scared into his grave and I’m coming for you, Jake, I’m coming for you all, before the devil walked in Mattingly and “I know what you did in the Holler that day” and the town meeting and Justus. Back in a time when all I had to worry about was keeping my fears hidden and whether the gray on the door would look better in “squirrel” or “sterling.”

  But now it was Wednesday, and everything had changed.

  Kate no longer spoke to me. We rode to the office that morning in silence, our only company the radio. I inched my hand onto the console, hoping she would place hers on top—by choice or force of habit, I didn’t care—and lace her fingers into mine. She did nothing but stare out the window and keep her hand atop the notebook on her lap. She’d said nothing of her trip to the Ruskin boy’s house.

  The only words she’d offered me since I told her of Taylor had come after I woke screaming the night before. “It’s going to be okay,” she’d said. I was thankful to hear it, even if we’d both come to the point we didn’t believe it anymore. Kate had wanted to know what I’d dreamed and said she’d dreamed as well—had fallen back to a warm spring day twenty years gone, when she took a boy’s hand and led him behind the bleachers. She lay with me and said some ghosts never go away, and I knew that was true.

  For me, I’d spent that night in front of a mound of rocks along the riverbank in Happy Hollow in a time I’d not yet lived. I stood with a man I knew to be Taylor Hathcock. Kate and Lucy Seekins were there too. And Phillip, standing in our midst with an upturned fist pointed to us all. There was fire and screaming, and there was an end.

  I said nothing of this to my wife as we lay there in the stillness of the night. Kate fell back into her silence and found her sleep. I never did.

  To make matters worse, that morning I found Kate’s hush now extended to Zach. He’d gotten out of bed and refused to say so much as good morning to either of us. Kate and I both tried prodding some sort of conversation from him, but it was as if the times had rendered our son deaf and mute. And really, who could blame a chi
ld for being such? In many ways Kate and I had become the same. In their own way, everyone had.

  We each went to our respective corners when we arrived at the office, Kate to her desk, me to mine. I watched her study her notebook through the window. Justus and his men were already out. To where and for how long was none of my concern. I was too tired. I leaned over the desk with my hand to my forehead and felt my eyes closing, thought this time maybe there was no going back, because Taylor was out there and Kate knew I’d let him go just as I’d let Justus go, and how in the only way out is through, Jake, because I’m near and you’re dead. Do you understand what I jerked my head up and rubbed my eyes, blinking the dream away.

  Kate looked at me through the window. I waved her off and decided to give Bessie a workout before tackling the door. Kate said nothing when I walked past her. I rested my hat upside down on the iron bench by the back door.

  There were no faces on the target that morning, just an unsteady thumping of steel against wood and a worry that the shaking in my hands made Bessie miss just as often as she flew true. Twenty minutes later a layer of sweat had replaced the sound of Phillip telling me I could never go back again.

  I’d just sunk Bessie into the target again when a voice said, “Easy there.”

  Kate was in the doorway when I turned. I thought she must have been the one who spoke, but she stepped aside so Trevor Morgan could walk through.

  “Some people’d take that as a warning, Jake,” he said. “You thinking of me when you threw her?”

  I didn’t say either way and moved down the dirt path, smirking at the newspaperman’s fancy suit. Fresh off the rack at the JC Penny, no doubt. “What are you doing here, Trevor? Ain’t you got CNN to talk to?”

  Trevor said, “I don’t want no trouble,” then smiled. “Wait, that’s your line.”

  “Jake and I aren’t having what you’d call a good morning, Trevor,” Kate said. “You don’t want to make it worse.”

  I freed Bessie, walked up the path, and spun, releasing her without looking. She landed square, the handle perpendicular to the ground. If I had nothing else right then, it was that Kate and Trevor had not witnessed another errant throw. I walked back and said, “State your business.”

  Trevor leaned against the wall. He looked first to Kate, then to me. “Came to make peace. What peace I can, anyway.”

  “That’s two people in two days who’ve sought me out for that,” I said. “Must be Christmas.”

  Trevor ignored that. “We both have our duties in this town, Jake. Yours is to protect it, by force if necessary. Mine is to protect it with truth. I had to run that story.”

  “The story, yes.” I wedged Bessie free. “Not the tripe on the back page. I said stick to the facts. Telling everyone Taylor Hathcock’s the devil wasn’t a fact.”

  “That so?” Trevor asked. “Man blows into town leaving a trail of blood and destruction, then disappears into thin air? Leaves his partner to die out of fright? Sounds like the devil to me. What was I supposed to do, Jake?”

  “Tell the truth,” Kate said. “Let it speak on its own. There’s a wide space between that and what you wrote, Trevor.”

  “Maybe.” Trevor nodded. “Maybe you’re right, Kate. But I got a feeling this isn’t over. It’s like an itch deep in my ear that I can’t scratch. Been trying to figure it out. All I can come up with is that you’re hiding something, Jake.”

  Kate looked at me. She kept her face stoic, but I could see the panic beneath. Panic and rage.

  “Never really cared for you, Jake,” Trevor said. “You Barnetts think you own this town, always have. That’s bad enough. But you, Jake? You’re worse. All you do is leech off the people who pay your salary. You treat this job like it’s some kind of eternal vacation. I knew you’d lie down in all of this with Taylor Hathcock, but I didn’t figure you’d hide. Sure, might be because your daddy’s back in town. But there’s something else, and I’m duty bound to find out what it is.”

  I passed them both, wheeled, and fired. Bessie flew, this time striking with such force that the three poles holding the target buckled. But the throw was off. I’d aimed for the center and hit the lower right edge instead, a good foot and a half from where I’d meant, and I thought of what Justus had said about a hunk of tree not striking back.

  “Do what you gotta,” I said, and I made my way down the path again.

  Trevor grinned. “I am. Been doing a little digging. County police might not have found anything on Taylor yet, but I have.”

  I stopped. “What’d you find?”

  “Not a what, a who. Taylor’s aunt. She doesn’t live in Camden anymore. Took off for West Virginia fifteen years ago. Not the sort of person who’d leave a forwarding address, if you understand me.”

  Kate reached out and took hold of Trevor’s arm, a small act that only intensified the smile on his face. “How did you find her?”

  “I might run a hick newspaper full of stories about crop futures and 4-H meetings, Kate, but I know what I’m doing. The other day when you two and Uncle Jimmy were gawking at Justus and wondering what in the world you were going to do, I was on my way to the Camden post office. Postmaster there’s been handling the mail for fifty-odd years. Figured he could steer me in the right direction. Mailman always knows everybody’s business, doesn’t he?” Trevor pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and waved it in my direction. “Name’s Charlene Patterson. Lives in Parker. Just over the mountains a piece, I believe.”

  “Why not give that to Alan Martin?” I asked. “Or call this lady yourself? Why are you doing this for me?”

  “I’m not doing this for you, Jake. I’m doing it for Kate.”

  Trevor kept the paper out. When I didn’t move, he dropped it into my hat.

  “Thank you, Trevor,” Kate said.

  “My pleasure.”

  I thought Trevor was going to add a little extra something on the end, something along the lines of Anytime, Kate, you ever need something, you just let me know. But before he could, the front door flew open with such force that the handle crashed into the wall behind. The three of us looked into the foyer through the open back door. A loud voice called for help.

  Kate was the first through. The stranger was a short, portly man in a wrinkled suit that hung from a pair of rounded shoulders. He stood just inside the doorway, hands shaking at his sides. His bloodshot eyes flitted about the room.

  He looked at Trevor and asked, “You the sheriff?”

  “I am,” I said, stepping around Trevor. “What’s the problem?”

  “My daughter’s gone missing.” The man twisted his neck and blew out a series of short gasps that sounded like muffled cries. “Something’s happened. You have to come.”

  Kate’s hand went to her mouth.

  Trevor asked, “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Seekins,” the man said. “My name is Clay Seekins. My daughter is missing.”

  2

  What little of the room Kate saw appeared as disjointed patterns of overturned furniture and sparkling glass, like something seen in a kaleidoscope. Faraway voices surrounded her. The lower half of Jake’s faded jeans crossed the upper portion of her vision, there for a moment and gone. Remnants of the pictures that once graced the mantel lay at her feet. Jagged shards of glass shimmered in sunlight filtered through the living room window. And there was something else, something with words, wedged into the carpet. Kate reached down to pick it up and pinched a shattered bit of glass instead. It pierced the tip of her finger, drawing blood.

  Another pair of legs, thicker and shorter than her husband’s, moved from north to south along the periphery of Kate’s downward gaze. She remembered those pants belonged to Clay Seekins and this was his house, this was Lucy’s house and Lucy was gone. Clay said something—Kate couldn’t make out what it was, but it had been loud enough to pierce the fog that had rolled in around her. He moved away as another pair of suited legs arrived, these not moving past but holding still. Trevor, Kate thoug
ht, those pants belong to Trevor, he’d come to the office wearing a suit in case the networks called but that had yet to happen. Mattingly’s ills had reached only as far as Stanley and Camden. The world was full enough of bloodshed and hate; the death of a single boy didn’t seem to matter.

  She heard her name called. It was nothing more than dim static, like holding a conch shell to your ear. Kate heard her name again. She felt hands upon her shoulders. She looked up to see Trevor’s lips moving.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re bleeding,” Trevor said. He took her hand and held it up. A drop of crimson fell from Kate’s fingertip to her palm. Trevor reached for the handkerchief in his breast pocket and wrapped it around the wound. “There. You okay?”

  Kate wondered why Trevor was there and then remembered he’d followed Jake. Jake had told him to stay on the porch, but Trevor had rushed inside when Kate screamed. She remembered seeing him and Jake and Lucy’s daddy and all that . . . that destruction.

  And then, the fog.

  Trevor held Kate’s bloody hand, his fingers caressing hers. She pulled away, unsure if the revulsion she felt was from what she knew had happened in the living room or if it was the wounded look of rejection on Trevor’s face. She unwrapped the handkerchief and handed it back.