Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

by Sallie Bissell

  “Okay,” Logan’s voice came from behind her. “I think you’ve washed all your sins away.”

  She shook the water from her face and rose to her feet, stepping up close to him.

  “I’m not going in any cave, Logan,” she said calmly, staring into his ravaged face. “You’re going to have to kill me here, and you’re going to have to look me in the eye while you do it.”

  He shrugged. “Not a problem.”

  He raised his pistol, aiming it directly into her face. Just as his finger eased over the trigger, she lunged forward. She felt the bones of her left hand pop as she slammed both her fists into his jaw. The force of the blow thrust her sideways, but it took him totally by surprise. With rubbery legs, he collapsed on the ground, groaning as the wind whooshed out of him. She heard the gun clattering across the shale, rattling like bones in the night. Swiftly she lifted her right foot to punt his balls into the next county, when he rolled sideways and tangled his feet up with hers. She fell, her tailbone smacking hard against the rocky ground.

  “You little bitch!” he gasped, scrambling for the gun.

  She picked up a piece of shale and threw herself on top of him, smashing the rock into his skull. He roared with pain, then rolled toward the creek, desperate to shake her off. She scrambled up and started kicking. Kidneys, eyes, scrotum, whatever she could connect with. He rolled toward the water like a hewn log. In the darkness she heard him curse. Gasping for breath, she looked for the gun, but it was impossible to see. Now struggling to his feet, in the shadows he looked like some fat slug trying to crawl through salt.

  With the bloody rock in both hands she flung herself at him again. This time he fell back into the water, thrashing and churning as he tried to regain his footing. She attached herself to him like a barnacle, holding him under the frigid water despite his blows to her stomach and breasts. “Don’t,” he sputtered, bobbing to the surface, desperate for air. “I can’t—”

  “Is that what my mother said?” cried Mary. “Or was it my dad?”

  “Swim—” he gurgled.

  “I didn’t know that, Logan. But then, I’m as dumb a fuck as my dad!” With those words she crashed the rock into his temple. He sank again; she pummeled him twice more, the blows making sick, wet whacks against his head.

  She lost her grip on him, then he surfaced a few feet downstream, the current now carrying him along. Blood gushed down his face and his one good eye held the wide, shocked stare of death as he made a grab for the last boulder that would save him. Though she knew she was pushing the limits of her own strength, she awkwardly splashed forward. She brought the rock down again and again, smashing his face, his hands, trying to break his hold on anything that kept him breathing air instead of water.

  “No!” he pleaded, choking and coughing.

  “Don’t like dying, huh?” She flailed at him like something gone mad. “Neither did Irene. Neither did Jack Bennefield. Neither did Martha Crow!”

  He sank beneath the water for a moment, then rose again, blood covering his face, his fingers no longer able to find purchase on the boulder. “But she was mine!” he cried. “I loved her!”

  For a second Mary almost pitied him, this singular monster for whom love had grown into a virulent cancer. Then she remembered that all the sorrows of her life had sprung from his heart, his hands, his sick brain. “But she never loved you back, Logan,” she told him.

  She never knew whether he heard her or not. His eyes rolled back in his head, his hands slid off the boulder, and he sank beneath the water. She listened for the sound of anyone thrashing farther downstream, but all she heard was the endless roar of the water on its millennia-long journey from the mountains to the sea.

  Chest heaving, she hoisted herself upon the boulder. She sat, shivering, still gripping the bloody rock, then she began to cry great, gulping sobs. It was finished. Finally, and completely. She’d killed the man who’d killed her mother and ended a malevolent love that had begun back when young men brought their dates fat corsages and combed their hair like Paul McCartney. A long time by human standards, but not long at all for the stars. She looked up into the sky and found Jonathan’s beloved Orion, Betelgeuse beaming centuries-old light down from the hunter’s shoulder. Finally she’d found the answer to the great question of her life. For the first time ever she finally knew the why.

  Forty-seven

  For a long time she sat there, listening to the water, her thoughts roiling, wondering what she should do with the rock she’d used to kill Logan. She knew she ought to save it as evidence for the cops, but then again, she wondered if she shouldn’t take it and put it on her mother’s grave. Let it serve as the capstone to the pile of seven she’d already left there. In a way, that seemed fitting; in another way, it seemed a sacrilege. Her mother had been good, kind. To top her grave with a stone rusty with her killer’s blood would demean Martha’s memory. Mary lifted the rock up, trying to embed its weight and heft forever in her memory, then she let it drop. It sank as profoundly into the water as Logan had, swept away forever.

  Only then did she climb off the boulder and fight her way through the swift, neck-deep current to the bank. With her clothes heavy and dripping, she pushed through the pines and across the meadow, trembling under the caress of a cold night breeze. She located the van easily, its loaf-like shape looking out of place beneath the frilly, graceful pines. Logan had left the doors unlocked, but had taken the keys with him on his trip downriver. Mary rummaged around until she found a hunting knife under the passenger’s seat and then managed, with some major contortions, to cut the duct tape that bound her wrists. With chattering teeth, she searched the vehicle for dry clothing. She found a pack rat’s array of stuff—a laptop computer, her purse, Gabe’s gun, three bottles of baby formula, and blessedly, in an old knapsack in the back of the van, a size XXX camouflage suit still in its plastic wrapper. As she stripped off her wet clothes and slipped the dry ones on, she spotted her mother’s photograph on the floor where Logan had tossed it.

  “I got him, Mama,” she said. “He won’t bother us anymore.” She buttoned the photo in the breast pocket of the suit, deciding that when she got back to civilization she would have a copy made and slice Logan from the shot. Then it would be just her mother standing there at sixteen, with the whole of her life a great un­wrapped present, one yet to be opened.

  In the glove box she found a stash of sweets that put Jonathan’s passion for Ding-Dongs to shame. Candy bars, jelly beans, a sticky, lint­ covered jar of sourwood honey. Mary took one chocolate bar and closed the compartment, re­pulsed.

  She found neither her Deckard County cell phone nor the one Logan had used to call with, so she stashed her candy in another pocket and stepped out of the van. If she could find her way back to the highway, she might be able to hitch a ride with somebody and bring the cops back up here at first light. Zipping Logan’s giant-sized jumpsuit to her neck, she started walking back along the way they’d come, the moon now a hard white eye staring down upon her.

  It was almost dawn before Bruce Clinedienst’s pickup pulled up alongside her. “You been in a wreck?” The man eyed Mary curiously, his lower lip plump with a wad of tobacco.

  “Kind of,” she replied. “I need to get to a phone, or the nearest sheriff’s office.”

  “I’m going into town to pick up my newspapers,” said Clinedienst. “You could call from there.”

  “What town would that be?”

  “Mars Hill, North Carolina.” He frowned at her disapprovingly, no doubt wondering why a young woman would be wandering along this road in an oversized camouflage suit not even knowing where she was.

  By the time the sun burned off the morning fog, Mary, Sheriff Jinx Jenkins of Madison County, two Carolina state troopers, one SBI agent, and two Feds were back at the crime scene. Though Sheriff Jenkins admitted once at­ tending a convention in Raleigh with Stump Logan, he worked the scene
with a chatty professionalism, scurrying back and forth between the federal and state officers. Mary sat in the backseat of a car with Federal Agent Lee Hoffman, watching as another agent took pictures of the van. She’d learned that both the Tennessee and Carolina highway patrols had been searching for the vehicle, registered to one Edwina Templeton, of Franklin, Tennessee.

  “Everybody had a ten fifty-five on you,” Hoffman informed her.

  Mary frowned. “Who turned in the call? Nobody knew where I was.”

  Hoffman flipped through a small notebook. “The original ABP came from Officer Jane Frey of the Franklin, Tennessee, PD. She answered a call from two Hispanics at a gas station.” Hoffman turned to her, puzzled. “That make any sense?”

  Mary laughed. “Actually, it does. Do you know where they are now?”

  He scanned another sheet of paper. “The His­panics are in INS custody. Officer Frey continued her investigation with information they gave her. Looks like she busted one—”

  “Edwina Templeton?” asked Mary.

  “Yeah. DBA the Tender Shepherd Home. Frey nailed her for an immigration violation at the Nashville Airport, but the Mexicans are singing their own little tune about Templeton forging birth certificates and selling babies to the highest bidder.”

  “Will the INS send the Mexicans back across the border?” asked Mary.

  “Not till after this goes to trial,” said Hoffman. “Probably, though, after that.”

  Mary remembered the woman’s luminous eyes, the man’s protectiveness of her. She would call Chip Clifford about them when she got back home. He could make sure those two stayed safe from their tormenting Scorpions. “Do you have a cell phone I could borrow, Agent Hoffman?”

  “Sure.” He held out a government-issue model that lacked a video screen. “Help yourself.”

  She called Danika first. The tall black woman’s voice bubbled with excitement.

  “We got them, Mary! They were at the gate, about to board the plane, but we got them!” Mary listened as Danika filled her in on the details—that the adoptive couple were nice people who’d been duped by some woman in Tennessee and another baby broker from Florida.

  “When did the baby’s mother get there?” asked Mary.

  “About two a.m. Man, is she one weird chick. And then they brought the father in, right off the chain gang, apparently.”

  Mary frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Leg irons, handcuffs. The sheriff acted like he was leading in a grizzly bear. Plus, the poor guy had been roughed up pretty bad.”

  Mary didn’t say anything. She was glad she hadn’t been there. It would have broken her heart to see Jonathan led around in shackles.

  Danika continued, “I gotta tell you, Mary. I had my doubts about the biological parents until Jim Falkner came along.”

  “What did Jim do?”

  “Turned them into saints in buckskin. There wasn’t a dry eye at that table when he got through. Then, when he suggested that the Walkingsticks had a damn good case of their own against Nikwase County, I thought that little sheriff was going to shit his pants!”

  Mary laughed, imagining her old boss’s bluster. “So what’s going on now?”

  “The baby’s in protective custody. The parents are staying at your house, waiting for the DNA tests to come back. The woman said it would be okay, and they both knew where you kept your key.”

  “It’s fine,” said Mary. “They’re both old friends of mine.”

  Mary listened as Danika went on about how cute Lily was and how heartbroken the Florida couple had been. She would have talked on for hours, but Mary interrupted her.

  “Let me get back to you, Danika. There’s another call I need to make.”

  She disconnected from Danika, then got the number of Vanderbilt Hospital. A moment later, a woman at the information desk answered.

  “I’d like to speak to a patient,” said Mary. “Gabriel Benge is the name.”

  “Just one moment.”

  The phone rang twice, then a woman said, “Room thirty-three seventeen.”

  “Could I speak to Gabe Benge, please?” Mary asked eagerly.

  “He’s gone. He done got released this morning,” said the woman. “I came up here to clean his room and he was about to walk out the door.”

  “He was?” Mary tried to hide the disappointment in her voice. “Is he okay?”

  “Well, I ain’t no nurse, but he looked okay to me.” The woman gave a raucous chuckle.

  “I don’t suppose he mentioned where he was going?”

  “He said something about going to Peru. Don’t that beat all? Get up from a hospital bed and head straight to South America?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “That does beat all. Thanks just the same.” With a sigh, she clicked off the phone. She’d hoped she and Gabe might have more to say to each other, but he apparently saw it differently. Probably a wise move, she decided. Digging up the dead was a lot safer than chasing after the living.

  She left numbers where she could be reached with all the law enforcement agencies involved, then she got Agent Hoffman to give her a lift to Tremont. Her little Miata sat where she’d left it, like a dog waiting for its master to come home. Throwing her purse and Gabe’s gun in the back, she revved the engine and pulled out onto the highway. With both the National Guard and the demonstrators gone, Tremont had regained its composure as a picturesque Tennessee mountain town, one that she sincerely hoped she would never see again.

  She drove south, again passing through Chattanooga, again thinking of Gabe, and Nancy Ward’s grave. A little after seven p.m., she pulled into her grandmother’s driveway. The old house looked more like an old friend, with lights twinkling in the living room and Jonathan’s truck parked outside. Wearily she pulled into the garage and trudged up the back stairs into the kitchen. Jonathan and Ruth sat in the breakfast nook, the Tiffany lamp that hung over the table casting their faces in a golden glow.

  “Mary!” Ruth looked up, surprised.

  “Hey!” Jonathan leapt from the table and threw his arms around her. Though he sported a black eye and a badly swollen jaw, he looked far from the handcuffed inmate Danika had described. “I’m so glad to see you!”

  “I’m glad to see you, too.” As she relaxed into his comfortable, familiar embrace, all that had happened suddenly grew real. “It was Logan,” she told him, fighting tears. “Logan all along.”

  “What?” He looked down at her, incredulous. The story of Logan and her parents came out in a gush. When she finished she felt drained, as if she’d emptied some long-buried cache of emotion.

  “I figured it must be something like that when Ruth told me what you’d done,” Jonathan said, holding her tight. “I wanted to come help you, but I couldn’t. I don’t know what I would have done if anything had—”

  “Hush.” Mary stopped him quickly. “It’s over. Let’s not talk about it anymore.” She looked over at Ruth. “Let’s talk about Lily.”

  Smiling, Jonathan grabbed her hand and pulled her over to the table. Ruth got up and made room for her between them. “Glad you’re back, Mary,” she said quietly.

  “Hi, Ruth. How are you?” Mary couldn’t help but check for the wild, erratic gleam that lately had appeared too often in Ruth’s eyes. But tonight she seemed calm to the point of being subdued. Mary was delighted. Ruth deserved a rest after the great storm of losing Lily.

  “I’m okay.” Ruth rose from the table. “Would you like some soup?”

  “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.” Mary turned to Jonathan. “I talked to Danika earlier, so I know Jim Falkner’s representing you, but tell me what else is going on.”

  “Lily’s in Child Protective Services right now,” said Jonathan. “It’ll take about a week to get the DNA tests back, although Falkner said he would have them rush it.”

  “So have you seen her at
all?” Mary asked, foggy on her child custody procedures.

  “No,” snapped Ruth. “I haven’t been allowed to even touch her.”

  “Well, a week will pass quickly,” Mary promised. “What about the couple from Florida?”

  “They’re fighting it,” Jonathan replied. “They hired an attorney and are staying here in Atlanta, waiting for the results of the test just like we are.”

  Mary tried to imagine two people cooped up in a hotel room, all their hopes pinned on a re­port that she knew would only bring them bad news. “That’s sad.”

  “Not nearly as sad as if they’d flown off with Lily,” said Ruth, stirring a pot on the stove.

  “No, of course not,” Mary agreed.

  “So there’s not much we can do but wait,” Jonathan continued. “Is it okay if we stay here?”

  “As long as you like,” Mary said. “Maybe you ought to go over to Grady and have someone look at your jaw.”

  He started to reply, but Ruth returned to the table, carrying a steaming bowl.

  “I know you must be hungry, Mary. Please try some of this soup.”

  “Thanks, Ruth, but I stopped on the way and ate a hamburger.”

  “Well, if you change your mind.” She put the bowl of thick, orange-colored liquid down in front of Mary.

  Mary shook her head. “I’m going upstairs. I need a long, hot shower and about a hundred hours of sleep.” She stood, Jonathan and Ruth wavering before her eyes. “You two make yourselves at home. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Koga.” Jonathan smiled, his hawkish eyes kind. “I don’t know how we’ll ever repay you.”