Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

by Sallie Bissell

  “I’m the baby’s godmother.” She looked directly into his eyes, refusing to back off. “Now would you please tell me what has happened?”

  The sheriff turned to the young woman who sat beside Ruth. “Miss Wachacha, why don’t you tell Ms. Crow the story?” He flipped back several pages in his pad. “I’ll go over my notes again while you talk.”

  Ruth’s companion gave a disgusted sigh, but began a tale she’d obviously told more than once, about how she and her new friend Bobby Puckett were sitting in the pop-up when a man named Joe Little Bear appeared, claiming to be an old Army buddy of Jonathan’s who’d been sent to fetch the baby to be on TV with Ruth.

  “What Army outfit was your husband in?” Sheriff Dula interrupted, looking at Ruth.

  Ruth shrugged. “I don’t know… Jonathan doesn’t talk much about it.”

  “Eighty-second Airborne,” Mary answered quietly. “He was a medic in the Gulf War.”

  Dula raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as he jotted something down on his pad. Mary had her own question for Miss Wachacha. “Had you ever seen this Joe Little Bear before?”

  “No.”

  “Did your friend Bobby Puckett know this man?” Mary instinctively fell into the rhythm of the courtroom. Gabe Benge leaned against the door, his face rapt with attention.

  “No.”

  “So you’re telling us that you just handed Lily over to a man you’d never seen before merely because he claimed to know Jonathan?”

  The woman’s mouth curled downward, sneering. “He knew Jonathan. He said Ruth was going to be on TV. It sounded okay.”

  Mary looked at the sheriff. “Why haven’t you put her in jail?” she asked, not bothering to hide her disgust. “For child endangerment.”

  “I had her loaded up in my squad car,” Dula replied coldly. “But Mrs. Walkingstick here threw such a fit that I let her out.”

  “For God’s sake, she’s my cousin,” Ruth snapped. “She came here from Oklahoma to baby-sit Lily, not steal her!”

  Mary bit back a cruel response: there was no point in questioning Ruth’s choice of babysitters now. At this moment Lily was the only one who was important, and every second counted. “Does anyone know what this Little Bear looked like?”

  “Here.” Gabe Benge handed her a piece of lined notebook paper. “Puckett drew this.”

  Mary looked at the drawing. Bobby Puckett had drawn a surprisingly detailed drawing of a man in his mid-twenties. The man’s eyes looked scared more than hostile, and he sported the scraggly mustache popular with southwestern tribes.

  “He wore a rally badge and said he was Navajo,” Clarinda added helpfully.

  “All the official badges are photo badges.” Gabe Benge lifted his own for Mary to see. “And none of the Navajos here have ever heard of a Joe Little Bear.”

  “Have you searched the campground?” Mary asked the sheriff.

  Benge answered. “Our security teams did an immediate camper-to-camper search. Sheriff Dula closed off the campground about three hours later.”

  “Son, my boys have searched every car that’s left this place since we first got the call.” Dula thrust out his lower jaw like a bulldog. “Most of my men have been busy trying to keep a lid on John Black Fox’s boys.”

  Mary frowned. “Who’s John Black Fox?”

  “President of the Red Nation,” Dula told her.

  “Runs around in makeup and a diaper. Assaulted the governor this afternoon.”

  “John Black Fox is a radical environmentalist,” Gabe Benge explained further. “Believes we are truly in the eleventh hour, ecologically speaking, and any action to save the planet is morally supportable. Today he gave the governor a pie in the face.”

  Mary repressed a smile. “I saw that on television. Sheriff, you believe the pie thrower also took this baby?”

  “Could have. Any one of a number of people could have. Environmentalists out to air their griefs, construction workers out of a job, a few locals who don’t care for outsiders coming in and making trouble. Hell, I’m not sure that Mrs. Walkingstick’s husband didn’t do it.”

  Mary blinked, stunned. “Jonathan?”

  Sheriff Dula turned to Ruth. “Why don’t you fill her in on the rest of the story?”

  The heartbroken woman lowered her face like a beaten dog. “Jonathan never did want us to come here. We argued about it all day Thursday, and yesterday, as we were getting ready to leave, he decided to take some man hunting instead.”

  “Is that why he threw his car keys at you?” Dula needled.

  “He tossed the keys to me, Sheriff. Nobody threw anything.”

  “Miss Wachacha here claims he got pretty mad.”

  “Miss Wachacha hands babies over to total strangers, Sheriff,” Mary reminded him. “Believe me, Jonathan Walkingstick would never throw anything at his wife.”

  Dula turned his chill gaze on her. ‘’Miss Crow, for someone who lives two hundred miles away in Atlanta, you seem to know an awful lot about Mrs. Walkingstick’s husband. You two don’t have any little secret sweet thing going on, do you?”

  Mary’s throat grew tight. Once we did, she wanted to say. Very secret and far sweeter than you can imagine. “I’ve known Jonathan Walkingstick all my life, Sheriff,” she replied steadily, keeping her eyes away from Ruth. “I can absolutely assure you that he would not kidnap his own child. Has anybody even tried to get in touch with him?”

  “We’ve notified the Pisgah County sheriff and the Cherokee tribal police,” Dula said. “They haven’t found him yet.”

  “Gabe loaned me this.” Ruth raised a cell phone. “I’ve called the store every fifteen minutes, but he’s not there. He’s still out with his hunting party.”

  “Did he say who he was taking with him? Where they were going?”

  Ruth shook her head. “Out for boar is all he said.”

  “That’s probably Cherokee County,” said Mary. “Southwest Carolina.”

  “You hunt boar, too, Ms. Crow?” Dula smirked.

  “No. But I grew up there.”

  “Okay, folks,” the sheriff said, putting his pad back in his pocket. “That’s it for tonight.”

  “What are you going to do?” Mary asked him.

  “I’ve got some boys coming over at first light with their bloodhounds. Those dogs can find most anything, living or dead.”

  Ruth covered her face with her hands. Mary noticed two huge wet spots on her T-shirt, directly over her breasts. Then she realized that even though her baby was gone, Ruth was still a nursing mother.

  “I’ll see you folks first thing tomorrow,” Dula threw over his shoulder as he walked, toward his cruiser. “Get some sleep.”

  They stood in stunned silence after Dula left, then Ruth began to weep.

  “I’m so sorry…” Her apology came out in wrenching sobs. “Jonathan was right. I never should have come here…”

  As Ruth wept, Mary sat numbly, unable to comfort her. Once again, Jasmine Harris’s scream echoed in her head, this time joined by a newer, smaller voice, both crying for help, both turning dark, imploring eyes directly at her.

  Fourteen

  MARY LAY IN Jonathan’s camper, trying to tamp down the panic she felt in closed-in, cave­ like places. Before Russell Cave exploded, small spaces had not bothered her. Now she hated airplanes, walked up the six flights of stairs to her office, and had only recently begun turning off her light to go to sleep. The camper was low-ceilinged and close, and every time she closed her eyes she saw Irene Hannah’s face swimming up at her through the darkness.

  They’d gone to bed after Sheriff Dula left. Ruth had finally introduced the pouty Miss Wachacha as Clarinda, her cousin from Oklahoma, then proceeded to darken the young woman’s mood further by telling her that she had to surrender her bed to Mary. Before they doused the lantern, Mary had offered Ruth one of
her Xanax, thinking it might help her get through this horror of a night, but Ruth brewed a cup of tea with some leaves she fished out of the medicine bag she now carried. By the time Mary got back from brushing her teeth at the nearby bath house, Ruth was stretched out on the mattress, snoring.

  “What did she take?” Mary asked Clarinda, who appeared to be medicating herself with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “Beats me,” Clarinda replied sourly. “You Carolina people are the ones into this herb shit.” Mary took off her shoes and collapsed on top of Clarinda’s bed. The insistent rhythm of the rally drum had finally stopped; only the gurgle of the nearby creek broke the nighttime silence. She lay staring into the darkness, her claustrophobia forgotten as she tried to figure out who might have stolen this baby. Ruth had apparently made some serious enemies: both the construction workers and John Black Fox’s militant environmental group seemed to have reason to hate her. Though Indians were not above stealing cars and TV sets and other people’s wives, babies were rarely included in their criminal repertory, and most hard-hatted construction workers were more likely to take a lead pipe to someone’s skull than to snatch an infant. As Mary stared into the shadows, the only other possibility she could think of was an obsessed, childless woman who stole infants for pleasure and profit.

  Dwayne Pugh. The thought struck her so hard, she felt as if she’d been slammed with a brick. She’d blindsided him in court Friday with Jas­mine Harris, stunned him with that child’s testi­mony against him. Could this be his sick idea of revenge? Her mind raced. Pugh was easily capable of something like this—he had the money and the smarts, and his kiddie-porn network consisted of a bunch of self-aggrieved perverts who would rejoice at sticking it to someone with an office in the courthouse. But how could Pugh have connected Lily with her? No public record existed that linked her with any of the Walkingsticks, and the friends to whom she’d shown off Lily’s picture certainly wouldn’t have told Dwayne Pugh about her.

  “Don’t be so self-centered,” she whispered, forcing herself to breathe more slowly. “You prosecute criminals in a courthouse hundreds of miles away from Ruth and Jonathan. Not all the dots connect to you.”

  Satisfied that Pugh’s trial and Lily’s abduction were just a miserable coincidence, she tried to sort through all the other people Ruth had likely pissed off. Finally she fell into a dream where Dwayne Pugh held a shrieking baby bear in his arms as Stump Logan chased her like Frankenstein through a mine shaft, his footsteps rever­berating like gunshots in her ears.

  She jumped as if she were falling, and her eyes flew open. The dream seemed so real, the footsteps so loud that she sat up in bed, her heart thumping. Then she realized that the banging was real—someone was pounding against the side of the camper.

  “Mrs. Walkingstick! Wake up!”

  Mary rolled off the mattress and shot to the door. Dula and Benge stood outside, their faces grim. Dear God, Mary thought. They’ve found Lily. And she’s dead.

  “What is it?” she asked, dreading their reply. “The search-and-rescue boys are here,” Dula informed her. “They’ll need to get a scent from the baby’s clothes.”

  “Give us a minute, Sheriff,” Mary answered, limp with relief. “Mrs. Walkingstick’s still asleep.” She glanced at her watch: 5:02 a.m. The sleep that had felt like a ten-minute nap had lasted four hours. She put her shoes on, then shook Ruth and her cousin awake. Moments later, they stepped from the camper. Ruth carried one of Lily’s little jumpsuits and a bright pink blanket.

  Four men in coveralls stood quietly by Gabe Benge’s van, accustomed, Mary supposed, to meeting at odd places at even odder times of day. Coffee steamed from the paper cups in their hands, and four sad-looking bloodhounds lay at their feet, thumping the ground with their tails as the three women walked toward them.

  Dula pushed forward. “Have you got something with the baby’s scent on it?”

  “These.” Ruth held out the clothes and the blanket. Her whole body shook as if she’d been marched at gunpoint in the endless hours since Lily’s abduction, she managed to keep her voice clear and steady.

  “That’ll do,” said one of the trackers. He took the little jumpsuit and stooped to hold it to his dog’s nose. The rangy hound sniffed it noisily, then scrambled to his feet, pulling his master toward Ruth’s camper. “Come on, Moe,” the tracker urged. “Let’s go find her.”

  His companions did the same thing with their own dogs. In moments, all the teams had dis­persed, dogs with noses to the earth, men fol­lowing them, leather leads in hand. Mary wondered if the dogs would bay like Plott hounds or beagles, but Moe and his companions worked without a sound, as if mindful of the sorrow of their task, graceful as ghosts through the trees.

  “What do we do now?” Ruth pitifully asked Sheriff Dula as the last team disappeared into the shadows.

  “Nothing,” he replied glumly, running a hand over his hairless head. “Except wait.”

  Fifty miles across the mountains, Jonathan Walkingstick lay staring into the darkness, listening to the quivering cry of a screech owl. He’d drunk the six pack of beer he’d brought and spread his bedroll in the back of the broken-down truck, curling up with an old Stephen King novel he’d found stuffed under the seat. He’d slept fitfully, waking for good when the owl began calling close to the camper, as if protesting his intrusion into its hunting grounds.

  Yawning, he sat up, reflexively uttering the Cherokee word for screech owl, “Wahuhu.” Though he heard screech owls most every day, he hadn’t spoken that particular word in years. Why had it floated to the top of his subconscious today?

  “Wahuhu,” he repeated, the syllables sounding strange to his ears. Mostly he was happy to leave the Cherokee speaking to Ruth. He thought it pointless to become fluent in a language that no more than a few hundred people still spoke, but sometimes the old words came to him. Wahuhu. Ahwe. Atsadi. Owl, deer, fish. Ruth, of course, would claim he was channeling some long-dead Cherokee hunter. He chalked it up to too much beer and too little sleep. Still, it would be fun to teach Lily a few words of his own someday. Let Ruth instruct her in Granny Broom’s goofy herbal remedies and political nonsense. He, her father, her ehdoda, would teach her about real things. His things.

  All that, however, was years away. Right now Lily was asleep across the mountains in Tennessee and he had a fifteen-mile hike ahead of him and a clutch to replace.

  He scooted out of the back of the truck, grab­bing a package of Ding-Dongs and the thermos of coffee that amazingly, he’d remembered to bring with him. Though it was still dark, he knew by the soft, feathery fluttering in the trees that the birds had awakened, the sun would soon rise. Sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck, he ate the cupcakes and drank a cup of the still­ steaming coffee and wondered how his family was doing. Probably just fine, he decided. As long as Lily has Ruth, she’s happy. As long as Ruth has a scratching post to sharpen her claws on, then she’s happy. If they lived close to a competent mechanic, they could probably exist perfectly well without any help from him at all. Still, he was going to join them. He needed them, even if they didn’t need him.

  He popped the last bite of Ding-Dong into his mouth and washed it down the rest of his coffee. He’d better get going if he wanted to make it to Tennessee by tonight.

  Without bothering to lock the truck, he shoved his wallet and car keys in his back pocket and began to make his way up the road in the darkness, walking in the long, silent strides that had carried his ancestors up and down the Appalachian mountains for the past two thousand years. He and Mary Crow used to walk like that for hours when they were children, and he could still cover more ground at a walk than most white men could jogging.

  Two hours later, he reached the paved road. Fifteen miles to go, he told himself. Unless somebody comes along and gives me a ride.

  “Fucking bastard.” Aloud, he cursed the stu­pidity of his plight, the time and money lost on th
is wild-goose chase. If he ever saw that Dun­can character, he was going to beat his five hun­dred dollars out of him. If he ever saw Ruth again, he was going to show her the proper way to drive a manual transmission in the mountains.

  He stopped abruptly, surprised. What did he mean if he ever saw Ruth again? Of course he would see Ruth again. Tonight, if he had any luck with the clutch. Tomorrow, at the latest. What was he thinking about, never seeing Ruth again?

  Clarinda, he decided, attributing his subcon­scious slip to his wife’s cousin. He’d known that girl was trouble the minute she’d walked in their door. Clarinda, the adored cousin. Clarinda, the small bent twig on the much-missed family tree in Oklahoma. Clarinda, the secret spoiler, who would happily sow the seeds of discontent just to see what might grow.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, quickening his pace, his footsteps echoing on the blacktop. He should have gone to that rally, regardless of how angry he was with Ruth. Now Clarinda would have her ear, unimpeded until he got there. But Ruth, he could just hear her say, her voice soft as down yet lethal as a whiff of cyanide. North Carolina’s so green and strange. You’re so for away from home. Everybody misses you so. You don’t want Lily to grow up without knowing your own family, do you?

  All that, Jonathan knew, was true. He and Ruth had talked about it, and although she missed her parents horribly, she also realized that their life was here. But he knew the kind of spin Clarinda could put on it. Why won’t Jonathan let you come home? Why does he hate the causes you be­lieve in? Why is he so anal about Lily? Pretty soon, he’ll be making you stay at home, too.

  All at once he grew aware of his footsteps. Rapid, hard, urgent. He was almost running. He stopped and looked at his hands. They were clenched into fists. He was out here in the middle of a forest, ten miles from the nearest human being, spoiling for a fight. He shook his head. What was he thinking of? Ruth loved him and Lily and the store. He loved her. Sure, they had been at odds with each other since Lily’s birth, but what couples didn’t fight? And what man wouldn’t balk at having his baby daughter cared for by someone who thinks piña coladas are a food group and Buffalo wings are haute cuisine?