by Ninie Hammon
But he was only able right now to feel his own loss. Maybe someday he would care about Miriam’s but not right now.
“Later,” he managed to croak. “I need to be alone now with the Lord.”
He was standing by himself on the back porch, the murmur of voices coming from inside the house muted. But Duncan wasn’t with the Lord. Not in that sense. Not in the sense of communing with the Almighty, basking in the joy of being a child of God. He was “with the Lord’ only because the Lord was everywhere. But he was not in any kind of communion with the great I Am.
Right now, if he had come face to face with the great God Jehovah, he’d have screamed obscenities at Him.
His baby girl was dead. She had killed herself — flung herself off the Scott’s Ridge Overlook onto the jagged rocks in the Rolling Fork River! Why? What had been so horribly wrong, so devastating that she would rather die than face it? He desperately wanted to know the answer to that question, would find out why if he had to search for the reason every day for the rest of his life!
But not now. Not today. Right now, he was so full of grief it shoved every other thought and intention out of his heart and mind.
God had taken his precious child.
On some level, Duncan Norman realized he was not the first father who had ever lost a daughter, that he was in no way unique and special in his pain, that he had no more right than any other mortal to question the will of the Almighty and His absolute right to exercise His will in whatever way suited Him.
He knew that. Understood it. But the cold, hard reality was that he flat-out didn’t care. Didn’t care about anything “spiritual” after Sam Sheridan and that other woman — Charlie something, the daughter of Sylvia Ryan, he thought — came to his door. He’d invited them in, the pain in Sam’s eyes only mildly frightening him at first. After all, people came to see him all the time in pain, needing his comfort, needing the comfort of God that he could assure was theirs for the asking.
Then Sam had said Hayley’s name.
Just said her name, and Duncan knew she was dead.
Only her name.
Miriam had not picked up on it, though, had rushed forward in the bit of awkward silence that followed Sam’s statement that, “we have found Hayley.” Miriam had relaxed in a heap, collapsed on the arm of the chair in the parlor, her body a study in relief.
“Thank you, Jesus!” she’d said. “We have been worried sick, imagining all kinds of horrible things. Thank you, Sam, for finding her. Where is she?”
And then Sam had said the words Duncan knew she’d say but that confused Miriam.
“Bascum’s.”
“What’s Hayley doing at Bascum’s? Why—?”
And when realization landed on Miriam, she backed up from it, cried out no, put her hands out in front of her as if she could physically hold back the reality of it. Then she went from zero to sixty on the hysteria scale, screaming “no, no, no!” and shaking her head frantically, absolutely refusing to hear the words that came after.
Hayley was at Bascum’s because she was dead. Skeeter Burkett had found her body in the river.
Sam had paused then, in the profound silence that had fallen when he and Miriam were so shocked and horrified they were incapable of sound. “It appears she died Saturday night.”
And then Miriam dissolved in a puddle.
Hayley had been dead for two days. All that time, all those minutes and hours in between then and now, when they were looking for her so frantically, turning over every stone, calling her friends …
She had been in the river. Her cold, dead body had been in the river.
“Duncan … please.”
Such need in Miriam’s voice, it tore out his chest.
When he turned to her, he flashed on the movie, on Hayley crying out “Daddy,” and he knew he must right now look like Atticus Finch had looked in the courtroom scene when he was cross-examining the redneck farmer who’d charged his client with rape.
“I said to leave me alone.”
Harsh and cruel, the words sounded harsh and cruel. Because they were. But he didn’t have anything in him to give. His faith, his belief, his hope, everything he had and was about had drained out of him when he learned his baby girl was dead. Now, when he needed faith, needed strength, needed the hope of his years of closeness to God, there was nowhere to go. He could do nothing but scrape at the bottom of an empty bucket. The sound the cup made on the metal at the bottom ground into his soul.
Duncan Norman turned then from his desperate, shattered wife and strode past her back into the kitchen, past people who spoke to him, he supposed, through the kitchen and living room to the stairs. He took them two at a time, up to Hayley’s room.
Suddenly, if he didn’t get to Hayley’s room, if he didn’t go there where her essence was—
The face. Gone. Smashed in. Crushed in.
Your little girl is the face you have in your wallet.
He should have listened. Dear God, how he wished he had listened.
He opened her door, stepped into the room, closed it behind him and leaned against it, panting. He was crying, too, he supposed. He couldn’t tell. He could feel that his cheeks were wet and his shoulders were shaking, but there was no sound.
He sat down on the edge of her bed — it was unmade. He’d made Miriam leave it that way because there was something terrifyingly final about making up the bed before the child came home.
And — oh, God, forgive him! — he’d wanted Hayley to make it up when she got home. It was her job, after all, and he was determined to teach her to be responsible, to honor her obligations.
The bedspread that was half off the bed, hanging on the floor, was the bright red of the University of Louisville, with the insignia of the U of L cardinal — looking mean — emblazoned on the front.
There was never any doubt what Hayley Norman would be “when she grew up.” She had never wavered. She had kept her dolls so wrapped up in bandages and Band-Aids they all looked like survivors of an earthquake.
Someday, Hayley Norman would be a doctor, she’d announced proudly when she couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. Now, at sixteen, almost seventeen, she’d walked that ambition back. She and her mother had already started pouring over University of Louisville Nursing School brochures and checking into the availability of financial aid.
Duncan Norman was a minister. His salary was barely enough to put food on the table and he had never been able to put a dime aside for Hayley’s education.
Now, there’d be no education to pay for. Now … he needed to begin considering how he was going to pay for her funeral.
He did cry then, put his head in his hands and sobbed. Cried until his sides ached and his throat was raw.
And that’s why he found it. He reached out to pull tissues from the box of them on Hayley’s bedside table and only one tissue came out in his hand. The box wasn’t full as it seemed to be. The lone tissue on the top rested on something else in the box. Hid something else in the box. He lifted the box and looked through the hole on the top. Inside was a narrow book with a leather cover. He had never seen the book before, had no idea where Hayley had gotten it. But it was obvious what it was. Printed in swirling cursive letters on the cover were the words: My Diary. Which explained why she’d hidden it in the tissue box. Bound within the pages of that book were his little girl’s most private thoughts, her hopes and dreams and sorrows.
He pulled the volume almost reverently out of the box. What lay inside was private. He would never have dreamed of intruding on that privacy if Hayley had been alive. But now, he held in his hand the intimate thoughts of the little girl who would never be able to speak them, share them with her daddy.
His fingers trembled when he opened the book and began to read.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sam was quiet as she drove from Rev. Norman’s house back to the animal hospital. She was anxious to check on E.J. They’d worked out shifts among the six of them — S
am, Charlie, Malachi, Judd Perkins, his daughter Doreen Jaggers and Raylynn — to sit with him because Sam didn’t want him to be alone, not even for a minute. They had a long list of other volunteers they could tap into if the need arose. They hadn’t yet needed the others because of Raylynn. She was omnipresent, in all the cracks, taking up all the slack. There’s no way they could have pulled it off without Raylynn’s help, not with all the other assorted catastrophes she and Charlie and Malachi had to attend to.
There’d been quite a few medical semi-emergencies. Becky Sue Potter still hadn’t had that baby. It was more than a week overdue now and what would Sam do if …? Asa Morgan, the little boy Sam’d treated for poison ivy on Friday had come back Monday. He’d kept scratching it and now had a yellow pus-y infection on his calf. There’d been gashed fingers and kids with ear infections along with gall bladder attacks and kidney stones — which Sam couldn’t do anything about but people came in for help anyway.
At least they did at first. But the numbers had tapered off — dramatically. Sam wanted to believe, said she believed, that was because folks were concerned about using up what little gasoline they had left, were taking care of their own issues at home.
She did not want to believe that fewer people used the clinic now because there were fewer people to need it. Fewer people period.
People vanishing.
“Is it just because everybody’s scared, is that it?” Charlie said and Sam drew her thoughts back away from the abyss. “Is that what all the … violence is about?”
Sam didn’t know where Charlie was going with the remark.
“I mean everybody cooped up together like this, a pressure cooker. Is that why … how many violent deaths have there been, in just this two-week period?”
There’d been Martha Whittiker. Somebody’d bashed in her head and then dumped her body in her grandson’s apartment to blame it on him. That’s what Liam thought, anyway. But Liam was murdered before he could prove it. And there was no doubt in Sam’s mind who had shot him down in cold blood. The same person who’d hanged Dylan Shaw the next day when she had no proof he’d committed a crime. Viola Tackett wanted to demonstrate her authority and Dylan was the sacrificial goat on the altar of her dreams of conquest.
Howie Witherspoon had killed his wife and tried to kill his son, would have if Malachi hadn’t stopped him. Shot him. And now Hayley Norman.
“Half a dozen people — Nower County’s a more dangerous place than the east side of Chicago!” When Charlie spoke again, the bravado had drained out of her voice. “And when Viola Tackett finds out Malachi didn’t stand down like she told him to … we’ll be adding my name to the list of—”
“That’s not going to happen!” Sam hoped there was more confidence in her voice than she felt. In truth, she was terrified that at any minute Viola Tackett would come charging into her house — where Charlie was staying — with guns blazing. “We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to get out of here!”
She saw Charlie look at her watch and shake her head. Maybe Charlie had noticed the same thing Sam had noticed, but Sam didn’t ask … because she flat-out didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to be right … that time was no longer moving too fast in the world of the Jabberwock. Now, it was moving too slow.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Douglas screamed. Shrieked. The cry didn’t even sound human, a screeching wail that cored its way into Rusty’s soul. The sound became a permanent part of Rusty in that frozen moment and he’d remember the sound for the rest of his life.
Rusty knew what happened even before he turned around because he had heard the rattle, but maybe Douglas never did. It was impossible to find out what Douglas had or hadn’t heard or seen or felt because the moment the rattlesnake sunk in its fangs, Douglas Taylor left the building. He was never again coherent. He was either screaming or hysterical or … but that part was later.
“Douglas.” The name rode the breath knocked out of Rusty’s lungs, whispered because there was not enough air to say the word out loud.
Douglas was writhing on his back in the leaves, kicking his feet like he was throwing a tantrum, and holding his left hand with his right. The left was already beginning to swell. He had his head tilted back and the veins in his neck bulged as he shrieked.
All that was a horrifying sight. But more horrifying by far was the sight of the rattlesnake that had bitten him. It lay in the dirt only a couple of feet from Douglas’s face.
Rusty knew quite a bit about snakes, actually, had done a diorama of a snake’s habitat in fourth grade. The snake he had used as an example looked just like this one — greenish brown with gray V-shaped bands evenly spaced along its body. A timber rattlesnake.
The one that lay in the dried leaves beside a shrieking Douglas was huge, maybe four feet long, and it seemed to Rusty that the sound of its rattle was even louder than Douglas’s screams.
Words formed in Rusty’s frozen mind like the answers to questions on a Magic 8-Ball. Just suddenly there out of the dark water. The words were the first line of the report he’d turned in with the idiot diorama — “The most important thing to do if you find a rattlesnake in the woods is to get away from it, moving slowly backwards. If threatened, rattlesnakes can and often do strike more than one time, and the snake determines the amount of venom to inject with each bite.”
Rusty grabbed hold of Douglas’s flailing foot and began dragging him down the steep slope away from the snake. He was hard to hold onto because he was wiggling and squirming and screaming, but downhill helped. The big timber rattler made no move in their direction. It slithered away into the dead leaves and its camouflage quickly made it invisible but Rusty kept an iron grip on Douglas’s ankle until he’d dragged the boy thirty or forty feet away from where the snake had struck. Then he let go of the boy’s foot and dropped to his knees beside Douglas, crying out his name even though he knew Douglas couldn’t hear him.
Douglas’s left hand was swelling and turning purple — you could actually watch it getting bigger and bigger. The boy’s face was pale and he had broken out into a full body sweat.
The weight of responsibility landed on Rusty with the force of a piano thrown out a third-floor window onto his head.
He had to do something. He had to do the right something. And he had to do it fast.
And he was so scared. Not one time in the entire twelve years that Rusty Sheridan had been drawing regular breaths on the earth had he ever been this terrified.
If he didn’t do the right thing, or did something and it was wrong, Douglas could … He wouldn’t let his mind go any further than that, but the sight of the swelling hand and wrist made a statement that didn’t need words.
Think. Think!
He tried, but his thoughts were spinning around and around in his head and he only seemed able to hold onto one of them long enough to think a little piece of it before another shoved it out of place and demanded he attend to it.
… raise the area above the level of the heart …
… cut the wound … no, don’t cut the wound …
… suck out the venom … no, that’ll only …
Use a tourniquet.
Apply ice.
Then Rusty screamed, a cry wild and Jurassic in its fury and fear, seared his throat as he roared out of him, ripped out his chest.
He screamed and screamed.
Let his voice mingle with Douglas’s in a duet of terror and pain and fear.
And then he didn’t scream. He cut off in mid-cry.
Douglas never stopped screaming, but he wasn’t as loud as before, perhaps because he was getting hoarse. Or perhaps because he couldn’t catch his breath.
Rusty’s screams stopped because his thoughts had finally ordered themselves. One big thought had stopped in its tracks and all the little spinning ones had crashed into the back of it.
I have to get help.
Other reasonable instructions followed in the wake of the big thought, but the imperative “G
et Help” was lit up like a flashing neon sign in his brain.
Keep him still.
Let the wound bleed … some of the venom will be washed out by the blood. But Douglas’s bite, two ugly black holes on the back of his hand, was not bleeding. Likely because blood flow had been cut off by the swelling. His hand was already almost twice normal size in just …
How long?
How long ago was he bitten?
That seemed like a piece of information Rusty needed to know, but he didn’t wear a watch and had no idea.
Keep him still. Keep him quiet. Keep him calm.
Negatory to all of the above. The only possible course of action Rusty could see lay in two opposite directions.
He could leave Douglas here and go for help. Or he could try to get Douglas out of the woods by himself.
He probably should have chosen Door A. It was probably the smartest course of action, but he could not make himself do it. He could not make himself leave a ten-year-old boy whose hand and arm were swollen and purple, lying on the ground screaming.
And what if he couldn’t find where he’d left him?
These weren’t woods Rusty was familiar with. He knew the way back to Douglas’s house, but there was no guarantee he would be able to retrace his steps back to this particular spot in the woods.
He had to get Douglas out.
How?
Carry him?
Rusty was his mother’s son, tall and lanky … and slender. Douglas was his physical opposite. And the way back to Douglas’s house was up and over Donavon Rock. They’d crossed the big outcrop on the way here. It was the boundary beyond which Douglas’s mother absolutely forbid him to play. Because in the opposite direction, downhill, was the Beaufort County line.
Rusty scooped Douglas into his arms, the way the hero always carried the frightened woman out of the burning building. He made it maybe a dozen steps before he had to go down on his knees and dump Douglas out onto the ground.
