by Ninie Hammon
“We ain’t got to worry about gasoline. Now go on! Git!”
Viola had the gasoline problem solved, but she didn’t let on. She’d closed that loop three days after J-Day when she killed Edgar Paltrow.
Big Ed had a worthless piece of bottom land on Owl Creek Road right next to the Drayton County line. He’d been a welder by trade, back when he worked instead of lived off the gubmint dole and he’d got drunk at Viola’s whoop-ti-doo last summer and bragged how he didn’t never have to buy gasoline ever again. There was a little Jiffy Stop Grocery Store in Drayton County, up on a hillside probably wasn’t a hundred yards from the Nowhere County line — sold groceries, cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, and had propane tanks for exchange next to the big ice machine beside the front door. There was also two gas pumps out front though hadn’t but one of them worked in ten years. Big Ed said he’d been called in when the gasoline storage tank buried in the ground under the pumps commenced to leak and the county health environmentalist had got his panties all in a wad because gasoline was seeping along the water table and showing up in folks’ wells two or three miles away.
It’d been a big deal, digging that tank out of the ground. The thing held almost thirty thousand gallons. They had to drain it, find the hole, fix it and re-bury the tank. The whole process took all one summer. It was Big Ed done the welding to fix the leak.
What with all the digging — huge piles of dirt and broke-up asphalt and concrete everywhere — didn’t nobody notice when Big Ed come back one night and attached a little pipe to the bottom side of the tank and buried a piece of plastic tubing from it that ran into the nearby woods. It took him a couple of months, but he run that tubing all the way to his place and had set himself up his own little gasoline spigot — had good pressure ’cause the Jiffy Shop was up on the side of a hill.
Viola’d figured out the day she set her boys at Foodtown to stop folks from hoarding that Big Ed’s personal gas station was a goose that’d lay golden eggs from now on. She’d gone out that very day and killed Big Ed herself, didn’t even let the boys know. Tricked him into climbing up into the back of her truck before she shot him so’s she could haul his body out into the woods and dump it.
Soon’s she got around to it, she was gonna get somebody to fix up his little gasoline spigot, attach it to a for-real gasoline pump … and sit back watching the golden eggs pile up.
That was for later, though. Right now, she needed to talk to Howie Witherspoon.
Chapter Thirty-One
As soon as Rusty was over the worst of his Jabberwock sickness, Sam took him home. She wanted to stay there with him to look after him, but he’d brushed her off, pointed out that she and dozens of other people had ridden the Jabberwock in the past two weeks and not one of them had suffered any permanent ill effects. He’d be fine.
She couldn’t argue with that. But the boy had been traumatized today by way more than a simple Jabberwock ride and when she tried to bring that up, he cut her off.
“Can we … not talk about that, about the rest of it, right now?” His eyes had pleaded, and she got it. You deal with hard stuff when you’re ready, and clearly Rusty wasn’t ready yet to confront the nightmare of Douglas’s death … and what Claire McFarland had said to him. So Sam settled him on his bed with a stack of comic books and somehow managed not to hover over him. And, oh, how she’d wanted to. She’d have put him in her lap if she could have! No, she wouldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t dream of crippling Rusty the way Claire McFarland had crippled her little boy.
Now, as the sun sank down behind the mountains, she sat in E.J.’s room while he slept, trying not to think about … about anything at all. Charlie’d returned to the clinic so she, Sam and Malachi could continue their Jabberwock discussion. But then … Douglas Taylor.
How were they ever going to figure anything out if they were constantly dealing with a crisis?
When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that the original objective was to drain the swamp.
True that.
Sam had taken over E.J. duty from Doreen Jaggers when Doreen left to go home to fix dinner for her little girls. Had wanted to sit with E.J. in part because she needed the calm and quiet. Raylynn would be here soon. Malachi was upstairs in E.J.’s apartment, trying to catch a nap since he’d been on night shift last night, and Charlie was … Sam didn’t know where. But if she was still here, maybe when Malachi woke up the three of them could put their heads together and …
Yeah, and what?
Sam needed to go to the bathroom, got up slowly from where she was seated in the chair beside E.J.’s bed and walked quietly toward the door.
“Think I’m asleep, do you?” he said.
His voice was airless, a raw whisper. It was a voice without strength, brittle and fragile. The sound of it broke her heart. She plastered a smile back onto her face and turned around.
“How long have you been playing possum?”
“Seems like … for days.” His eyes looked as weak as his voice sounded. Watery and sick, the eyes of an old person in a nursing home who’d been there so long they didn’t remember anymore what the rest of the world looked and felt like. Tired, resigned eyes. Sick eyes. “What do you know about oxycontin?”
“I know you’re addicted to it.” She hadn’t meant for that to come out as it had, blunt and harsh. She hurried on. “We can deal with addiction later.”
“Yeah, that’s what all the junkies say.”
“E.J., I didn’t mean—”
“Kidding, just kidding. I know you’ve been bumping up the dosage and you haven’t heard me complaining, have you? I’m just wondering …”
She let go of the door handle and went back to sit beside his bed.
“Wondering what?”
“I think it screws with your sense of time, the way a funhouse mirror distorts your image. It’s either that or the rabies has jumped the gun and is at this moment taking over—”
“You don’t have rabies symptoms.” Again, harsh when she hadn’t meant to be.
“Okay, no symptoms. But there are times I lie here and you, Malachi, Charlie and Raylynn are like the ponies on a merry-go-round, revolving in and out so fast it’s a blur. I catch myself straining to hear calliope music. Other times it takes a year to think a whole thought. Time gets stuck in the mud.”
“That’s not the oxycontin. I think it’s … the Jabberwock. Time’s not right. The weather’s not right. The stars aren’t right.”
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto. That it?”
“Yeah, but acknowledging that begs the question, if not Kansas — where?”
“That Oz song the munchkins sang, ‘we get up at twelve and start to work at one. Take an hour for lunch and then at two we’re done….’ That’s what it feels like sometimes. I lie here and time whizzes by.”
“It did whizz by, but now …”
Sam fell silent.
“Come on, spit it out.”
“Okay … the first time we all admitted we’d noticed time was screwy was on Saturday morning at the first meeting of the Breakfast Club.” When she'd first told E.J. about it, he had claimed the part of the nerd. “I told everybody that Rusty’d used his hourglass as a test and that there was still sixteen minutes of sand left in it when the clock on the wall said an hour’d passed.”
“So time really is moving too fast.”
“It was then, but now …” Sam didn’t know where to go with her thoughts, hadn’t mentioned it to the others. But maybe they weren’t telling her they’d noticed it, too. “Now, I think time has slowed down. I haven’t used the hourglass to check.” She looked sheepish. “Mainly because I don’t really want to know. But I’d wager that—”
“Now the sand in the hourglass will run out before the clock says an hour has passed,” E.J. finished for her.
“Yup. But why? Why too fast and then too slow?”
“Raylynn told me this morning that the stars in the sky were
screwy last night, too.”
“Yeah, we’ve all noticed that.”
“No, not regular screwy, new screwy. I’d noticed the stars weren’t right long before I went out to Judd’s on Friday. So had Raylynn. But she said that last night the stars — which can’t be real stars because they don’t blink — were all on one side of the sky. Half the sky had stars, the other half was just black.”
Sam hadn’t noticed that. But when she and Charlie had ridden home from the courthouse last night, they hadn’t been attending to random things like stars in the sky.
All she could do was shake her head in confusion. “Why on earth …?”
“I’m the guy with a fever … so don’t listen to me, but …”
He let the thought dangle. Now, it was Sam’s turn to tell E.J. to spit it out.
“Okay, what I was thinking is … the fast-time/slow-time issue, the stars. Perhaps there are other things we haven’t noticed. Is there still an impenetrable Jabberwock wall across every road out of the county? Has anybody actually gone out to check?”
“Well, no. Not that I know of. You think maybe—?”
“I’m just putting it out there, suggesting that it might be the Jabberwock is trying to spin too many plates at once.”
“And that means?”
“Perhaps our J-friend is getting overwhelmed.” E.J.’s voice was brittle and breathy, but there was a light in his eyes. “A whole county — when all it ever took before was a little town with a couple hundred miners. Snatching people and aging their houses a hundred years. The weather and the stars and the time, that’s a lot to keep track of.”
He had rolled over on his side as he talked and now he fell back onto the pillow and spoke through gritted teeth. “I think maybe he’s … slipping.”
As E.J.’d become more engaged in the conversation, he’d gained mental clarity. The effort of trying to put things together was good for his fogged mind, but he had no strength, no stamina. Sam wanted to pursue the point because she thought E.J. just might be onto something, but she let it go because she knew she was tiring him out.
“How about we talk about this later. Rest now. We wouldn’t want your army of antibody soldiers to be too tired to fight off the nasties.”
He lay quiet, clearly wanted to continue but just flat-out didn’t have the strength. “How’s Rusty doing?” he finally asked.
“He’s fine.”
“Let’s try that again. How is Rusty doing?”
Sam slumped back in the chair.
“Physically, his reaction to the Jabberwock … he’s recovering like all the rest of us did. Emotionally … Claire McFarland. If I’d had a tranquilizer gun yesterday, I’d have shot her with it. Or a taser! Maybe even a .22! Accusing Rusty of killing her baby by pushing him into the Jabberwock. She might still be screaming if Malachi -- or maybe her husband, I don't know which -- hadn’t forced the oxy down her.” Sam shook her head. “It’s not a sedative! But …” She thought about the pills she’d given to Duncan Norman for his wife.
What could she do? It was all she had.
“I bet Viola has a whole pharmacy full of illegal joy beans out there in Killarney,” E.J. said. “Shame they’re not the ones we need.”
Right. Rabies vaccine. Rattlesnake antivenom. Those would be the top two. But Pete was getting weaker every day without his chemotherapy. And Grace Tibbits. Sam hadn’t seen or heard from her since she and Reece were in the clinic Friday. Now Reece was … What’d happened to Grace?
E.J. reached over and patted her hand. “You need to go home and get some rest.” It was such a light touch, a feather. So fragile.
There was the sound of voices in the hallway and Sam had gotten extraordinarily adept at reading the emotion in voices when she couldn’t hear the words. Whoever was speaking was alarmed. Another crisis.
She got up to go to the door, but there was a knock on it and Malachi stepped inside out of the hallway.
“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be upstairs sleeping.”
“Lester Peetree came in and woke me up. There’s … a problem.”
Sam turned to E.J.
“I’ll be right ba—”
“You don’t have to go outside to discuss bad news. I’m no help, but it’s miserable just lying here wondering.”
E.J. didn’t even know what he didn’t know. There’d been no reason to tell him Viola Tackett had commandeered the Nower house and hanged an innocent teenager. Rusty and Douglas had turned up here in the Middle of Nowhere, so E.J.’d been aware of that. But the rest of it, Sam didn’t want to worry him.
Malachi took E.J. at his word and told Sam, “Lester noticed the basement door of Bascum’s was ajar — and he was sure he’d closed it after they brought in Douglas. So Lester went to check. Somebody’d broken in.”
“Broke into Bascum’s? What is there to steal at Bascum’s?”
Malachi paused for a breath before he continued and in the eternity of that moment, Sam felt the ground shift beneath her, heard the rumble of a coming earthquake.
“What’s missing is Douglas Taylor. His body. It’s gone.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Shep’s head snapped up and he heard himself say to Claude, “We got to get out to Gideon.”
Shep was only surprised that Abby wanted him to go there, not that she’d spoken the words out his mouth to Claude — ‘cause it was Abby done all the decidin’ about things now.
Soon’s he started thinking about it, Shep realized it’d kinda been that way all along, from the very beginning.
He liked to think about them days when him and Abby was just kids, junior high school — the day his friend Earl slipped him a note in class saying Abby Letcher had a crush on him. Shep could remember it like it was yesterday, feeling the heat flood up his neck and into his face and he was afraid to look up from the words printed on the paper because he just knew Abby was looking at him. That the whole class was looking at him and when they seen his face go all red like that, they’d start laughing.
He was wrong, of course. Abby was just listening to the teacher, wasn’t looking at him at all. Earl was, though, looking and grinning, his lip pulled back from his buck teeth, eyes all squinted up. Shep asked Abby once, a long time after that, of course, if she’d put Earl up to it, to telling him that she claimed him. She said no, but he wasn’t never sure she wasn’t just embarrassed to admit it.
Abby’d been the one said they’d ought to get married, too. He wanted to, they’d talked about it, but it’d been Abby who was the one said the words out loud for the first time. Oh, it wasn’t like Abby’d led him around by the nose or nothing like that, but she’d been the driving force in most of what the two of them had done in their lives.
That’s why it didn’t surprise him when Abby took charge once he’d got where he could hear her voice clearly, sitting there in that old house, wishing he was dead ‘cause he couldn’t imagine doing life without his Abby. She started out just telling him what she thought he’d ought to do. Wasn’t long, though, before she just done it. Like he was a glove that fit perfectly on her hand and when she moved it was his fingers that wiggled.
“Say what?” Claude asked.
Claude had talked Ronnie, Jim Bob and Virgil into a poker game after lunch, while they waited for Abby’s cousins to come back with the guns they’d finally agreed to let Shep and Claude borrow. They’d come back half an hour ago, but Claude was winning, likely cheating, and he hadn’t wanted to leave in the middle of his streak.
“We need to go now,” Shep said. “They’s on their way now and we need to stop ‘em.”
“They who and stop them from what?”
“Them folks as is meddling. The away-from-heres. Cotton Jackson and Pete’s girl and him as married a white woman.”
If you pointed out a thing like that out there in the wide world, folks’d get their panties all in a wad saying you’s prejudiced or you’s a racist or a bigot. In the mountains, didn’t nobody care about such things
.
“You looked outside?” Claude asked. “‘Pears it’s gonna come a gully-washer any minute. Why you want us to go right now?”
“Abby said.”
Shep looked at Claude, looked into eyes the same color blue as Abby’s. And he was grateful to see the shift there, the quarrelsomeness drain away. Maybe Abby was talking to her brother, speaking in Claude’s head, too.
Claude tossed his cards on the table, scooped his winnings off into his hand and started stuffing the bills and coins into his pocket.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Jim Bob said. “You can’t leave now. You gotta give us a chance to win our money back.”
Claude looked at him, then tossed the handful of bills and coins he had in one hand back onto the table.
“This here’s rent on them rifles,” he said. Then he turned toward Shep. “It ain’t gonna be easy to get a shot if it starts pouring.”
He was just stating facts, though. Not arguing.
Shep turned toward the door, hoping the windshield wipers worked on the truck he’d borrowed from his brother.
“We’ll git ‘er done,” Shep said. No, Abby said.
Sam made Malachi repeat what he had just said. Even though she had heard him clearly, she needed to hear the words a second time to validate the first.
“Douglas Taylor’s body is … missing?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lester had stepped into the doorway beside Malachi. He’d removed the Cincinnati Reds baseball cap that covered his shaved head and stood with it in his hands. “I left it in one of the drawers and soon’s I walked in, I saw the drawer was pulled back out of the wall. It was empty.”
It was horrifying to think that the closed-up funeral home’d had to be transformed into a morgue because the bodies had … just kept piling up.
Willie Cochran had been the first, of course. Abby had been next … what was left of her. Lester’d gone into Persimmon Ridge and returned to the Middle of Nowhere with a body bag. And they had … she and Malachi, the Tungates … they had picked up the pieces.
