by Sharon Sala
About an hour later, Dr. Quick returned. Melissa woke to good news. Nothing was broken, and the strain to her shoulders could be eased by alternating hot and cold packs.
“Is she free to go home?” Sully asked.
“Yes. Just rest for the next few days. No lifting, either. Let those strained muscles heal.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” Sully said.
“You cut up my clothes,” Melissa said.
Dr. Quick patted her knee. “We’ll get you a pair of scrubs to wear home. You can bring them back at your leisure.”
As soon as she was dressed, Sully went to pull the car up to the entrance while an orderly wheeled her out.
Someone sitting in the waiting room called out Melissa’s name, then waved and gave her a thumbs-up.
Sully was standing beside the passenger side, and when she came out, he opened the door. They loaded her up and buckled her in, and then together they headed for home.
He was thinking about the mess in the house as they drove, but as he approached the house, he saw several cars parked along the street.
Melissa noticed them, too. “That’s Laurel’s car,” she said.
“Laurel who cleans the house? It’s not her day to come,” Sully said.
She sighed. “Blessings being Blessings, I’m going to assume someone sent her and her crew here to clean up. I remember making something of a mess.”
“Really? The people in this town continue to amaze me,” Sully said.
And sure enough, as he helped Melissa out of the car and walked her to the house, they walked in to the scent of lemon and shining floors. Laurel came out of the kitchen with a dish cloth in her hand.
“I thought I heard the door open,” she said, and then looked at Melissa. “Oh honey, bless your heart. You’ve had more than enough of trouble. How are you?”
“Sore, but alive and grateful,” Melissa said. “How did you know to come today?”
“Oh, we had just finished up at Ruby’s house when she told us what happened. I called the other girls, and we came here. This is our gift to you. Now go get comfortable somewhere. We are so happy you’re okay.”
“Do you want to go to bed?” Sully asked.
“Yes, at least for a while. I want to get clean and put on my own clothes and lie down.”
“I can make that happen,” he said. “Just lean on me.”
* * *
While calm was being restored in Blessings, the hills above Aunt Sugar’s little house were swarming with Georgia State Police and officers from the county sheriff’s office, looking for Hoover Slade. Search dogs had been called in and were tracking Hoover’s scent from the blood he’d left in the stolen car, and a police chopper was flying recon for the police in the sky above.
With no legal authority outside the Blessings city limits, Chief Pittman and his men left the scene as soon as the state police arrived, with one of the deputies driving Melissa’s car home.
Sugar was so rattled and upset about what had happened that looking out at the police vehicles parked all about her property brought her to tears.
She couldn’t settle down to do anything she’d planned to do, so she made herself a cup of tea, added a bit of honey to sweeten it, and went outside to her swing on the back porch.
She could hear the hounds up in the woods, as well as the chopper circling the area. A couple of officers had been left behind at the house to coordinate the search areas and were standing at the hatch of one of their SUVs with a map spread out. She could faintly hear the radio chatter between them and the searchers.
There was a lump in her throat just remembering how Hoover had cursed her, saying ugly, hurtful things she would never forget. He and his brother had always been worthless, but never dangerous. Seeing him in this light made her fearful and ashamed.
“A disgrace. That’s what this is, a disgrace,” Sugar said, and took a sip of her tea.
* * *
Hoover hadn’t planned on the ensuing chase, but in his mind, he had practiced the run in this creek every day since they’d slammed the door on his cell, and again every night in his sleep.
He’d been running now for over an hour, and the longer he ran, the wearier he became. He never tired in his dreams, but the reality of this run was real. His face burned like hell where Melissa had scratched him, and his side ached. The muscles in his legs were burning, and his lungs felt as if they were about to burst.
He didn’t think the chopper overhead could see him in this creek from above, but he wasn’t sure. What he did know was if he got on solid ground, the dogs and the cops would eventually find the trail, so he put his head down and kept running until he ran out of creek. He’d come to the source and stared at the water bubbling out of cracks in some rocks on the side of a hill. He no longer had a choice. From here, he would be moving on solid ground.
When they were boys, he and Truman used to prowl through the abandoned shacks left up here from the old days of their grandpa’s moonshining, so he started that way, taking care to stay beneath the thickest trees and bushes.
About a half mile up, he paused to catch his breath. When he looked up, a tall, skinny woman of indeterminate age was standing in front of him with a squirrel rifle aimed straight for his head. Her long, messy hair was closer to gray than what bit of blond there was left. It had been braided into one big plait hanging over her shoulder, and she was wearing a raggedy red-plaid shirt and a pair of torn and baggy overalls.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he cried, and held up his hands.
“Are you the one responsible for that chopper flyin’ over my ’sang?” she asked.
Hoover groaned. People killed to keep their ginseng patches secret. All he could do was nod.
“What did you do?”
“Escaped from the state prison.”
“Did you kill anybody to get there?” she asked.
“No, no! I swear. I got caught with stolen property.”
She frowned. “The state police are after you?”
Hoover nodded.
“I don’t take to the state always bein’ in people’s business. See that path?”
Hoover peered into the brush and finally saw a faint trail.
“Yeah.”
“So you go ahead of me. I’ll be right behind you.”
Hoover started forward, then turned around to see what she was doing, and saw her shaking a few droplets on the path behind her as they went.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Deer urine. If the hounds are trailing your scent, this will confuse them. Now shut up and run.”
Hoover leaped forward, slashing through brush, pushing tree limbs aside to keep from getting hit in the face, and didn’t once look back until he ran out of tree cover and stopped.
“Stay in the trees as you circle the clearing. There’s a root cellar on the side of the house about ten feet from the brush. Open the door and go down. I’ll meet you from inside,” the woman said.
Hoover breathed a quick sigh of relief.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. I sure appreciate this,” he said and kept moving.
The moment he saw the cellar door, he darted out of the trees and raised the door, only to walk down into the darkest hole he’d ever seen. When he let the door back down, he began to freak.
“Oh shit. Something smells dead in here. What have I just gotten myself into?” he muttered.
He was at the point of going back up the stairs and running like hell, when a door opened. It was then he saw the stairs below it that led up into the house. He could see light and then the woman’s silhouette as she came downstairs with a flashlight and a glass of water.
“It smells a little rank down here, but I’m curing pelts and got a fresh one I’m still scraping on. Thought you might be thirsty,” she said.
“Oh, thanks,” Hoover said, and drank until the glass was empty.
She took the glass, then pointed the flashlight toward a dusty cot against the wall piled high with furs.
“Right there’s your sleeping quarters. Just move my pelts onto that old table. You might want to shake the covers off a bit before you rest. I’ll leave this here flashlight with you so you can see to move around. If you gotta go, don’t be doing your business in my cellar. You go back out into the bushes for that.”
And with that, she started up the stairs.
“Hey, lady! I don’t even know your name.”
“And I don’t know yours, so let’s keep it that way,” she said, and shut the door between them.
Hoover heard her turn a lock and then shuddered. He didn’t want to go back to prison, but this place was as close to a hellhole as he’d ever been in.
He clutched the flashlight in one hand and began moving the piles of pelts with the other, then set the cot on end to shake out the rags on the bed. When he glanced up to where the light was shining, he saw a huge snake curled up on a shelf.
“Oh, hell no,” he cried. He dropped the flashlight and ran up the steps and out into the woods without looking back.
Chapter 14
The search was in full swing up in the hills. Despite the run Hoover had made through the water and the random application of deer urine the old woman had left on the trail, the dogs eventually tracked the scent straight up to her house.
The sun was setting, the air already turning cooler as the searchers came out of the tree line into the clearing surrounding the house. There was a light shining through one window.
Someone was home.
And someone was in the cellar, because the dogs were at the outer door, baying and scratching. Their handlers were holding them back, waiting for orders from the police, when the old woman came out onto her porch with a shotgun.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked. “Somebody shut up them dogs. I can’t hear myself think.”
The dogs were called off as a trio of officers approached.
“That’s far enough until you tell me what you’re doing on my property,” she said.
They quickly produced badges as one of them took the lead.
“Detective Inman, Georgia State Police. Ma’am, what’s your name?”
“Tansy Runyan. Now I’m going to ask you again. What are you doing on my property?”
“We’re chasing an escaped prisoner, and our dogs tracked his scent to your cellar,” Inman said.
Tansy gasped. “Oh laws! You mean that man is down there?”
“I don’t know, but we need to search your house and the cellar,” he said.
“Yes, yes, come right this way,” she said, and started back into the house, while several of the officers started to go into the cellar from the outside.
“Wait!” Tansy yelled. “Wait! Larry’s down there, and I don’t want nobody scaring or hurting him in any way.”
“Who’s Larry?”
“Just a big old black snake. Best mouser I ever had. Let me go down from inside to make sure y’all don’t hurt him.”
“I hate snakes,” someone muttered.
“Ma’am, if our prisoner is in there, he and your snake may have already met,” Inman warned.
Tansy moaned. “I don’t want anything to happen to Larry. Hurry up,” she said, and darted into the house with a bevy of searchers behind her, as the others stood guard outside the cellar door.
The house was tiny and didn’t take long to clear.
“No one here, sir,” they said.
“This here door goes down to my cellar, but I always keep it locked from this side,” Tansy said as she turned the lock, but when she started to go first, Inman stopped her.
“No, ma’am. If he’s there, it won’t be safe,” he said.
“Oh my lord, I can’t believe all this is happening,” she said. “Yes, well…just don’t hurt Larry.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll be careful.”
“You’ll need this,” she said, and handed them her flashlight. The same one she’d retrieved from the cellar after she’d heard the prisoner running off. She guessed it was Larry that had sent him running, and as it turned out for her, his absence was a good thing.
“There’s no light down there?” someone asked.
“I don’t have lights anywhere here except lamps,” Tansy said.
They began breaking out flashlights. Nobody wanted to meet Larry in the dark. They filed down the stairs with Tansy right behind them.
“Oh hell! There’s Larry,” someone said, and someone else stumbled over an old three-legged milking stool in a panic to put some distance between him and the snake.
Tansy went straight to the snake coiled up on a shelf. “Now, Larry, no fussing at all the racket, okay? You’re safe,” she cooed, stroking his shiny skin.
“What the hell is that smell?” Detective Inman asked.
“Green pelts. I trap and sell. They aren’t all cured up yet.”
“Green as in fresh skinned?” he asked.
“Yep. Wanna see?”
“No, ma’am.”
Then Tansy started looking around her cellar, playing the part that would keep her out of trouble for harboring a criminal.
“Oh my stars! You were right! Someone was in my cellar. All my pelts are on this table, and they used to be on that cot over there.”
“You didn’t hear anything?” they asked.
“No. Maybe he was already gone before I got back from my patch.”
“Your patch of what?” the officer asked, picturing marijuana in his mind.
“’Sang. I got me a ginseng patch. It’s another way I keep myself fed. I trade pelts and ’sang for supplies. Don’t have no use for money up here.”
One of the officers radioed to the men above. “All clear down here. See if you can pick up a trail from the cellar back into the woods.”
“Ten-four.”
Inman walked out of the cellar into the yard just as the trackers were getting ready to move.
“Officer, when you followed the tracks up to here, whose tracks were laid down first? Hoover’s or the woman’s?” he asked.
“Oh, his for sure, Sarge. Her smaller footprint was on top of his.”
Inman nodded. This confirmed her claim that she could have come home after Slade was gone.
“Listen, it’s getting dark. Let’s find a place to stop for the night. We’re too far away to go back and resume in the morning. We’ll have to cold camp.”
“Yes, sir,” the men said. “We’ll let the dogs search to see if they can pick up his trail again, and then we’ll follow it until we have to stop.”
“Agreed,” Inman said. “We’ll be behind you.”
The trackers took off with their dogs as the rest of the officers came out of the cellar. Again, Tansy was behind them.
“Ma’am, we’re sorry to have disturbed you. We’ll be leaving the area as soon as we pick up another trail.”
He gave Tansy back her flashlight.
She took it, then held it against her chest.
“Good hunting,” she said. “I sure don’t want no more strangers messing around down in my cellar.”
Then she shut the cellar door and went back into her house from the front. She stood there a moment, listening to the silence and nodded her head. Just the way she liked it.
She went to her wood cookstove and took the lid off a pan sitting at the back, stirred up the cold squirrel stew inside, then carried it to the table and sat down to eat.
* * *
Detective Inman saw the storm coming in and knew being up in the hills in a thunderstorm wasn’t safe. When the first raindrops fell, he also knew they were going to lose the trail.
He grabbed his radio and call
ed in the searchers.
“Inman here,” he said. “A storm is coming. Get the dogs back to camp. We can’t get off these hills and back to our cars before the storm hits. We’ll have to take shelter somewhere safer than under these damn trees.”
“Ten-four” came the answer, and minutes later, the trackers and their dogs began showing up in camp.
As soon as everyone was back and accounted for, Inman pointed downhill. “We’re less than a mile from that abandoned cabin we just searched. Grab your gear and start running. We do not want to be up here dodging lightning strikes.”
* * *
While they were running for cover, Hoover had already made it over the crest of the hill and was all the way back down into the hollow below, walking as fast as he could, looking for a place to hole up for the night. He was cursing himself for leaving that flashlight behind. It would be dark soon, and he could use it.
Then he heard thunder and looked up just as a shaft of lightning came down out of the clouds and hit something on the top of the hill.
“Hot damn, it’s gonna rain out my tracks and my scent,” he crowed, and headed right back to the same creek he’d come up in. That was something they wouldn’t expect.
It was pitch-dark and pouring rain by the time he found the creek, but as long as he stayed in the water, he didn’t need light to know where he was going. This was the same creek that ran right past Aunt Sugar’s place, and it also ran through Big Tom Rankin’s place a few miles down, then through the woods and under the bridge at the north end of Blessings before emptying out into a river.
Hoover wasn’t sure where he would get out of the creek, but he wasn’t messing with Aunt Sugar again.
It didn’t occur to him that running in water with all the lightning strikes in the area was dangerous. But danger came to light when a shaft of lightning struck a tree on the bank just ahead of him. Even in the rain, the lightning lit a fire from the strike that blew up the tree, splintering it in all directions.
Hoover staggered back in shock, and then screamed as a hot, searing pain pierced his thigh. He fell backwards into the shallow water, momentarily blinded by the heavy rainfall in his face.
