by Billy Coffey
17
There wasn’t much sense sending Zach to school, not after what had happened. In a moment of near jest, Kate thought the truant officer would be calling if her son missed another day. Her concerns weren’t allayed when she remembered the responsibility of keeping Mattingly’s children in class rested on her husband’s shoulders. Given the way Jake had acted that morning, Kate half expected Bessie’s blade to lie at her own neck, followed by a warning to get Zach to school or else.
Jake hadn’t called since leaving for West Virginia. Nor did Kate call him. There wouldn’t be much to say other than Mattingly had been all but set afire by Justus’s arrest. Bobby Barnes proclaimed the whole thing a charade to cover up whatever other sins Jake had buried. He’d left soon after to make a pass through the hills beyond Crawford’s Gap, but with fewer men than Justus would have mustered. Trevor Morgan had disappeared as well, though Kate didn’t know whether it was to begin the next day’s front-pager or to prepare for the meeting that night. Alan Martin called to say Justus had been processed. Bringing in a wanted fugitive was surely a pretty feather in the state investigator’s hat, but Alan seemed to take no pleasure in it.
Any one of these developments (the last especially) would normally warrant a reaching out, but Kate kept the phone on her desk. She wouldn’t bother Jake with information she knew he had run away from, and instead let Reverend Goggins drive her and Zach home.
As the day wore on and afternoon turned to evening, Kate found herself checking the lane from the living room window at regular intervals. It didn’t help that Zach’s behavior had gone oddly calm. Kate had resigned much of the afternoon to comforting her son, but that comfort could only come if Zach was upset. He had asked nothing of Justus’s arrest or why his daddy had donned his uniform or where he had gone in it. Nor did he ask Kate to sit in the living room chair and rock awhile, as he usually requested when troubled. It was as though Zach had found a resignation in everything that had happened or a reason for peace. Kate didn’t know which it was. She only wished she could share it.
Jake made the turn up the lane near suppertime, just as she made another pass by the window. Kate went to call Zach from his bedroom, then swallowed the words when she saw how fast the Blazer approached. Something
(No, she thought, not something but something else, not one thing but one thing more, because we’re all on a ride that never stops but just keeps going faster)
had happened. She opened the door as Jake got out.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Jake came up the sidewalk nearly running, hat blowing back in the wind. He caught it with the hand that wasn’t holding Bessie.
“Yearbook,” he said.
“What?”
He took the porch steps two at a time, switched the hat to his full hand, and reached for Kate’s arm. Jake’s touch was soft, and she felt the tremble in his hand. Whatever hardness had been in him on the courthouse steps was gone now. She followed him inside.
“Our senior yearbook,” he said. “Do you still have it?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I talked to Taylor’s aunt. He went to the high school. Same year we graduated.”
Kate felt a sudden cold that tingled the skin on her arms. “What? How can that be?”
“He wasn’t there long. A week or so in the fall and then again in the spring, but I’m hoping it was long enough to get his picture taken.” Jake placed both his hat and Bessie on the television stand and rubbed his head. “Taylor knew things, Kate. He knew me. And I’m supposed to know him, or at least I think I am. I need that picture.”
Kate couldn’t feel herself moving, nor could she hear herself when she said, “Our closet maybe.”
He guided her to their bedroom. Kate went to her hands and knees inside the closet, breathing in the thick dust that had settled onto the wood floor. She pushed aside boxes filled with things long forgotten, hoping the yearbook wasn’t among them, hoping Jake was wrong. Her eyes settled on a box in the back corner. Written in black marker on the side was Kate’s Things.
“Help me,” she said.
Those words were meant as a prayer; Jake took them as a request. He bent down and pulled out the box. Kate removed the top. Gathered in a neat pile inside were a paper-clipped stack of movie stubs and pictures of her and her friends, and a senior superlative certificate that proclaimed Kate Griffith as the most popular girl in school. There was nothing in that box dated beyond the day Phillip died. It was as though Kate’s life had stopped that Friday afternoon, and since then she’d been trying to start time again.
Beneath all of this was the yearbook.
Jake set the rest aside and flipped through the pages, past names and faces they knew still. The freshman class first, then the sophomores and juniors. Kate bargained with the God she’d always loved but knew could never love her back, telling Him that He could have anything, anything at all, if Taylor’s picture was not there.
She scooted from inside the closet to beside Jake as he turned the page to the senior class. Kate’s eyes fell upon Jake’s picture, taken with how young he looked—a boy in a man’s suit. The page turned. There was her own face, body turned in profile and eyes ahead, flashing a smile that still charmed so many. Kate backed away as Jake turned the page, somehow knowing (knowing all along) what she would find there. Hers was the last picture and the last of the Gs. What came next would be H and Hathcock.
Kate heard the squeak of Zach’s bed and his feet hitting the floor. Jake fell still. She reached for his knee.
“I found him,” he said.
Kate reached for the yearbook and gently took it from his hands. She cradled it in her arms and then brought the page to her eyes. She saw the name listed second on the left side. She saw Taylor’s face. The long, stringy hair and the tattered Molly Hatchet T-shirt. The eyes filled with anger and an inability to do anything about it. Kate’s face turned the color of candlewax as her world shattered into a thousand tiny prisms in front of her eyes. It was not Jake’s fault, everything that had happened. Not even Taylor’s. It was hers. It was Kate’s alone.
“You know him,” Jake said. “Don’t you?”
Kate nodded, barely keeping down the bile that rose from her stomach. The yearbook fell onto her crossed legs. “He was the other one I tricked. The one with Phillip. No one ever knew what happened to him. He’s come back, Jake. He’s come back because of me. Eric Thayer died because of me.”
There came a knock at the door, followed by another. Hard, with a sense of urgency on the end.
Zach called, “Momma, Daddy, Devereauxs are here.”
Jake winced, but Kate said it was okay, she was okay. It was, as far as she could remember, the biggest lie she’d ever told. Jake left and walked down the hallway to the living room. Kate remained on the floor just long enough to turn to the next page in the yearbook. To see Phillip’s face. She followed, then, keeping the yearbook to her chest. Jake had just opened the front door as Kate entered the room.
“Hollis,” he said. “Edith. What brings y’all out?”
Hollis took off his cap and held it in his hands. “Jake. Sorry to trespass on your evenin’ like this. Had t’come, though. Weren’t no two ways about it.” He nodded past my shoulder and added, “Evenin’, Kate.”
Kate clutched the yearbook tight. Her cheeks felt hot, but they were not moist. At least, she thought, not yet.
“Hollis,” she said. “Hello, Edith.”
“Came out soon as I could,” Hollis said. “Woulda been sooner, but I been up all night an’ workin’ all day. Edith, she cain’t see the paper enough t’read it. It sat in the box ’til just a bit ago. That’s why we come.”
Jake said, “Well, if it’s for support, I thank you, Hollis. But me and Kate have something to talk over, and—”
Hollis drew in his eyebrows. “No, Jake. Ain’t that. It’s the girl. The one that’s come missin’. Well, she ain’t. Missin’, I mean. I seen her last night.”
18
Taylor’s cabin lay some eight miles northeast of the rusty gate. The river lay three miles to the gate’s northwest, and the grove where Lucy’s treasure lay stood ten miles due north. Draw a line connecting those four points, and what you have is the shape of a rough diamond. At its center stood a waterfall that emptied into the wide stream Taylor and Lucy now crossed. Taylor knew this waterfall well. It was where he’d huddled in fear the night Phillip was killed.
He was aware that part of the wood (as well as whatever may dwell in it) had not seen a man in twenty years and a woman in perhaps forever. That alone made Taylor mindful to keep the shotgun cocked and Lucy from wandering. Not that the latter would pose a problem. She had inched so close to him in the last mile that they were nearly conjoined. His left arm was drawn straight and down in front of her, like a shield.
“You feel it, don’t you?” he asked.
Lucy said nothing, but gave him a short nod.
Taylor led on, his silence a calm sea that hid churning waters beneath. He’d carried the memory of what had happened over Indian Hill in broad strokes, with the details left as irrelevant. He’d remembered the boy, but only from afar. Not because Taylor had moved on, but because of what he feared by looking too close.
They came to a small gully lined with smooth limestone sides. A thick layer of decaying bones lay upon the bare floor below. Lucy pulled Taylor closer.
“Don’t be roused,” he said. “Critter bones is all. They fall in there and can’t find escape. All those boys you bedded, girl, the momma you think’s gone and the daddy who cast you off, they’s all like those dead bones yonder, caught in a place of no leaving.”
Evening fell. They traveled on until they looked up to a mound of earth rising from the Hollow’s floor too perfect to have been formed by time and chance. Its sides were equal slopes of gently curving soil that rose to a thick copse of evergreens. Tall, browning grass grew along the sides. Taylor figured if there were any doubts left in Lucy that the Hollow was a living thing, the sight of that place would sear them closed. It was as though that great forest was a scarred old woman, and this was the place from which it took her sour milk.
“Indian Hill,” Taylor said. He looked at it with a longing that had awe at the top and dread at the bottom. “What lies beyond is the river, the cliffs, and the whole of me. For good or ill, Lucy Seekins, is for your heart to reckon.”
They took the hill hand in hand and reached the top as the sun fell over the mountains beyond. Taylor watched Lucy as what lay on the other side stole the little breath that remained in her. The river stretched out below them, sinking its way south and east through a gap the eons had carved through the cliffs. Water glittered in the soft rays of eventide like untold millions of churning diamonds that sparked and faded and sparked again. Rocks and deadfall lay strewn along the banks, marking the boundary of waterway and forest.
“We could live here forever,” she said. “Couldn’t we?”
Taylor nodded and looked out, far past the river bend to the cliffs. What he saw there struck him with horror. He squeezed Lucy’s hand.
“Taylor?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s no place for that. That shouldn’t be.”
“What shouldn’t?”
“There.”
It did no good. Taylor could see Lucy peering out past the river beyond the hill and into the untrodden forest on either side, but there was too much there. Too much wonderful.
“Don’t you see, lady?” Taylor asked. “I didn’t do that.”
He pointed to where the fading light shone brightest, far down the riverbank along the steep cliffs, where a mound of heavy stones lay piled high to toppling.
19
I stood there as Hollis’s words washed over me, trying to understand what he was saying, wanting to know what it meant.
Kate stepped forward and placed the open yearbook on a small table by the television. “What, Hollis? You saw Lucy last night?”
“Yes’m,” Hollis said.
“Where?”
He shifted his weight and looked at Edith, who had gotten her mind lost somewhere between the porch and the living room. She had done so with increasing regularity over the years, first in short moments and then in longer ones. Hollis told me once that he believed the place his wife went was a world of fuzzy edges and faint echoes just next door to our own. It pained him to see his wife fading away like that, though for that one particular time I believe Hollis took Edith’s going as a blessing. It meant she wouldn’t hear what he had to tell. And yet I wondered then just how much Edith Devereaux had known about her husband’s illegal activities over the years. I wondered how many of her fading spells were biological and how many were simply a blind eye turned to what she didn’t want to see. We all had secrets we kept and lies we told, and often the greatest among them were the ones we kept from and told to ourselves.
Hollis looked at me and said, “On the back forty. Been cleanin’ up there. Devil’s done found his way here, Jake, as you well know. And as you may not, ’twas me who blazed the path he took.”
I didn’t see the sense in arguing that point. If that week had taught me anything, it was there was blame enough to go around.
“And Lucy was there?” Kate asked.
Hollis nodded. “Come up on me like a ghost, Kate. Thought she was Bobby at first.” Edith made a move to the sofa. Hollis guided her there before adding, “She pulled on me, Jake.”
I chortled and felt a pang of guilt when I saw Kate’s serious look. But it was the only reaction that fit the picture in my mind of Lucy Seekins holding a gun.
“She pulled on you?” I asked.
“I’ll swear to it. Brought up a scatter-gun bigger’n her own self, leveled it right here.” Hollis pointed to his chest. “Said . . .”
“What, Hollis?” Kate asked. “What’d she say to you?”
Hollis’s eyes found his feet. He looked like a felon receiving his sentence. I thought of Justus and how he would look like that soon.
“Told me I peddled poison and ruint lives, an’ that I cain’t undo what’s been done because it comes back to haunt. That true, you reckon?” When he looked up, there was a pleading for comfort in his eyes. “Tell me it ain’t, Jake.”
But I could do no such thing. There could be no comforting Hollis Devereaux, at least not with the truth. Because the truth was that some things in life couldn’t be undone, and those were the shadows that followed you forever.
“Did she say anything else, Hollis?” Kate asked. “Did she look hurt or hungry?”
“Don’t rightly know, sorry t’say. I was more concerned with what that shotgun looked like than her. She was gonna run me through, Kate. She said I’d brought all this on us, and truer words were never spoken.”
Kate said, “That’s not what she meant, Hollis. She was speaking of her and her daddy, not the town. You have occasion to entertain Clay Seekins on your . . . back forty? Heavy-ish man, wears a suit?”
Hollis thought and then nodded. “Don’t know all the names of those I entertain, I’m afraid to say. But yes’m, I know a man in a suit. I didn’t know it was that girl at first, even after I saw her picture in the paper. She done shaved her head or somethin’. Looked like she come down with the mange. And she was talkin’ funny too. Said she had to wake me up.”
My ears perked at that.
“What is it, Jake?” Kate asked.
I looked at Hollis. “She said that? It was those words?”
“Yessir.”
“Timmy said Taylor told him those same words. Asked Timmy if he was awake.”
Kate’s hand went to her mouth. All the lies Trevor had spewed with his pen, one had turned to truth. Taylor had Lucy.
“Was she alone, Hollis?” I asked. “You didn’t see anyone else skulking about?”
“Dint see no one. One person get the drop on me in my own wood? I reckon maybe. But two?” Hollis shook his head.
“But how can that be?” Ka
te asked me. “If she was alone, why didn’t she run to town? Why didn’t she run to me?”
I thought I knew, but decided to keep silent on it until I was sure. Telling Kate the girl she’d so wanted to save had taken up with the one she’d lost so long ago would only break her heart all over again. And yet as awful as it sounded, it also sounded right.
My mind thought back to what Taylor had told me Sunday night.
But I got tricks too. Charlie weren’t the only one helping me. Got me a smart one.
I know what you did to that boy in the Holler that day, Jake.
I see far.
I always been close.
Close.
My knees buckled. Kate reached for me. There was little strain on her part; I couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and fifty pounds. All dreams and no meals made Jake Barnett a sickly boy.
“What, Jake?” she asked.
“I know where they are,” I said. “Taylor and Lucy both. They’re in the Holler.”
The weight of those words settled into Kate’s face first, then Hollis’s. Only Edith remained unperturbed. Such places as Happy Hollow didn’t exist in her sideways world. She looked up and smiled as Zach came into the room. He bent over the yearbook on the table and a dawning came over me then, like putting the last piece of a puzzle in place and finally seeing what picture it made. The door had come first. Then the father. Now the book. All that was left was the choice, and I found that choice easily made.
“I’m calling Alan.”
Kate said, “No, Jake. There’s no time. We can be there in half an hour.”
“We?” I asked. “You’re going nowhere near the Holler, Kate, and neither am I. Alan can get some men up there—”
