Serena

by Ron Rash

  In a while they passed a sign that said Madison County. The mountains around them rose higher, blotted out more of the sky.

  “Where are we going?” Rachel asked.

  “I called a relation of mine,” the sheriff said. “She’s an older woman who lives by herself. She’s got an extra room you can stay in.”

  “She your aunt?”

  “No, that would be too close of kin. A second cousin.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “Her name McDowell too?”

  “No, Sloan. Lena Sloan.”

  They drove west now, the road rising steadily toward mountains where the day’s last light limned the ridge tops red. Jacob waked for a few minutes, then nuzzled against Rachel’s breast and fell back asleep. It was full dark when she and Sheriff McDowell spoke again.

  “You ain’t tried to arrest them?”

  “No,” Sheriff McDowell said, “but I think soon I’ll get enough on them that I can. I’m going to have the state coroner in Raleigh help me. But until then you’ve got to stay as far from them as possible.”

  “How’d you know they was coming after us?”

  “A telephone call.”

  “A call last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they said Jacob was in danger, not just me?”

  “Yes, both of you.”

  “Do you know who it was, the one that called?”

  “Joel Vaughn.”

  “Joel,” Rachel said.

  For a few moments she didn’t speak.

  “They’ll kill him for that, won’t they?”

  “They’ll try.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I drove him to Sylva this afternoon so he could hop a freight car,” Sheriff McDowell answered, “one that wouldn’t be going near Waynesville or Asheville.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “If he did what I told him, as far from these mountains as possible.”

  The road leveled out a few yards before unfurling downward. Below in the distance were a few muted clusters of light. Rachel remembered how a month ago she’d sat before a hearth of glowing coals and listened to Jacob’s breathing, thinking how after her mother had left when Rachel was five there’d been so much emptiness in the cabin she could hardly bear to be inside it, because everywhere you looked there was something that had reminded her that her mother was gone. Even the littlest thing like a sewing needle left on the fireboard or a page turned down in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The same after her father died. But that night a month ago, as she’d listened to Jacob breathing, the cabin had felt fuller than it had in a long time. More alive too, a place where the living held sway more than those dead or gone.

  Now everywhere was emptiness, the only thing left the child sleeping in her lap. She thought about Widow Jenkins and Joel, gone now as well. A part of her could almost wish Jacob too were gone, because it would all be so much easier. If it was just her left, she wouldn’t even have to be afraid because all they could take from her was her life, and that seemed a piddling thing after all that had happened. Rachel thought about the bowie knife in the box trunk, how easy it would be to hide in her dress pocket, then wait until the last light in the camp went out and walk up to the Pemberton’s house.

  But Jacob was alive, and she’d have to protect him because there was nobody else to. She’d have to be afraid, for the both of them.

  “We just crossed into Tennessee,” Sheriff McDowell said. “They won’t find you here. Just don’t use your real name and don’t take the young one with you when you go into town.”

  “Besides them two you told me about, is there anyone else you figure might come after us?”

  “Maybe Pemberton, but I doubt it. Probably not her either. Most likely it’ll be Galloway.”

  Rachel looked out the window.

  “I’ve never been to no other state before.”

  “Well, you have now,” Sheriff McDowell said. “Not much difference though, is it?”

  “Not from what I can see.”

  The blacktop curved and the sheriff shifted gears. The road made a last brief rise and then plunged downward. They drove another thirty minutes before coming into a town. The Model T turned and bumped over railroad tracks, then passed a depot before stopping in front of a small white house.

  “Where are we?” Rachel asked.

  “Kingsport.”

  Twenty-eight

  “A RATHER DAINTY APPETITE TONIGHT,” SERENA said. “Are you feeling ill?”

  They sat across from each other in the back room, the table’s width between them, the empty chairs set against the walls. Pemberton noted the sound of Serena’s silver cutlery ringing against the bone china, how it further accentuated the room’s emptiness. Serena set her knife down.

  “No,” Pemberton said, and poured himself a fifth glass of red wine, staring at the crystal and its contents for a few moments before lifting the glass to his lips and drinking deeply. He set it back down, half emptied.

  “You didn’t used to drink this much.”

  The words were not spoken in a harsh or chiding way or even in a tone of disappointment. Pemberton looked up, and saw only concern on Serena’s face.

  “You haven’t asked about the other night,” Serena said, “when I went to Colt Ridge.”

  Pemberton reached for the glass but Serena lunged across the table, grabbing Pemberton’s wrist so violently that the wine splashed onto his shirt sleeve. She leaned her face near as she could, not letting go her hold.

  “We’ve both killed now,” Serena said urgently. “What you felt at the depot, I’ve felt too. We’re closer, Pemberton, closer than we’ve ever been before.”

  Madness, Pemberton thought, and remembered the first evening back in Boston, the walk down the cobbled streets to Serena’s lodging, the hollow sound of their footsteps. He remembered the moment he’d stood on the icy top step as Serena unlocked the door and went inside, pressed the front room light on. Even when Serena had turned and smiled, Pemberton had lingered. Some dim troubling, almost visceral, keeping him there on the step, in the cold, outside the door. He remembered how he’d pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his overcoat pocket, brushed some snow flurries off his shoulders as he delayed his entrance a few more moments. Then he’d stepped inside, stepping toward this room as well, into this moment.

  Serena withdrew her hand and sat back. She said nothing more as Pemberton poured himself more wine.

  The day had been warm so the window was open. Someone on the commissary steps strummed a guitar and sang about a big rock candy mountain. Pemberton listened to the words intently. It was the same tune he’d heard the porter whistling on the train the day Pemberton had brought Serena from Boston. Just twenty-six months ago, but it felt so much longer than that. The servers came and brought dessert and coffee. Pemberton finally felt the alcohol spread its calming glow inside his head. He let the wine have its way with him, glide him past where he didn’t want to dwell.

  Pemberton and Serena were finishing their coffee when Galloway came in. He acknowledged only Serena.

  “I got something to tell you.”

  “About what?” Serena said.

  “Vaughn,” Galloway said. “Had me a little chat with the switchboard operator. I figured that old biddy would of been listening in. It was Vaughn tipped off McDowell, which explains why the little piss ant’s skedaddled.” Galloway paused. “And that ain’t the only thing. A sawyer seen McDowell driving toward Asheville Monday evening with that Harmon girl and her young one. The dumb son-of-a-bitch didn’t think it worth telling anybody till today.”

  “That explains a lot,” Serena said.

  After Galloway left, Serena and Pemberton finished their meal in silence, then walked to the house. The porch light had not been turned on, and Pemberton stumbled on the steps, would have fallen if Serena had not caught his arm.

  “Careful, Pemberton,” she said, then ever so softly.
“I don’t want to lose you.”

  EDMUND Wagner Bowden the Third arrived at the camp office the following morning. He was a recent Duke graduate and, according to the senator who’d sent him, fancied the job might do for him what being police commissioner in New York had done for Teddy Roosevelt. Though, the senator had hastened to add, Bowden was no follower of Roosevelt in other ways. Bowden was exactly what Pemberton expected—soft and florid, a reflexive smirk behind a few tentative hairs attempting to pass as a moustache. The smirk disappeared when Serena quickly exhausted the young man’s conversational Latin.

  Bowden departed mid-morning for his first full day as the new Haywood County sheriff. He’d been gone less than an hour when he called Pemberton’s office.

  “Mr. Luckadoo from the savings and loan just came by to tell me that McDowell and a police detective from Nashville are at Higgabothom’s Café. They’ve been there all morning with Ezra Campbell’s brother. Mr. Luckadoo said you’d want to know.”

  “Did the detective come and see you first?”

  “No.”

  “Go tell him he’s collaborating with a man indicted for malfeasance,” Pemberton said. “Tell him that if he’s got questions you are the law in town, not McDowell.”

  Seconds passed and all Pemberton heard was static.

  “Speak, damn it.”

  “This Campbell fellow is telling the detective and anyone else who’ll listen not to trust me. He’s claiming his brother said you and Mrs. Pemberton would try to kill him.”

  “What’s the detective’s name?”

  “Coldfield.”

  “Let me make a few phone calls. Then I’ll come over there. If they look like they’re going to leave, tell Coldfield I’m on my way to talk to him.”

  Pemberton hesitated a moment.

  “Tell McDowell I want to talk to him as well.”

  Pemberton hung up the receiver and went to the Mosler safe behind the desk. He stood before it and turned the black dial slowly left and right and then left, listening as if he might hear the tick of the tumblers as they found their grooves. He pulled the handle, and the immense metal door yawned open. For almost a minute, he simply stared at the stacks of bills, then gathered up enough twenties to fill an envelope. He closed the metal door slowly, the safe’s contents sinking back into darkness, a crisp snap as the door locked into place.

  Pemberton took the photograph album from the desk drawer. He’d tried to dismiss the idea of Serena using his photograph to identify the child, but the thought had seized his mind like a snare he couldn’t pull free from. Pemberton hadn’t opened the bottom drawer, although several times in the last few days he’d allowed his hand to settle on its handle. Now he did. He opened the album and found the photograph of himself still there, as was the one of Jacob. But what did that prove or disprove, Pemberton thought. Like the hunting knife, it could have been taken and returned. He carried the photograph album to the house, shuffling papers and ledgers aside to place it at the bottom of the steamer trunk.

  As Pemberton drove out of the camp, he saw Serena on Half Acre Ridge, Galloway close behind. The eagle was aloft, making a slow widening circle over the valley. Their prey believes if it stays still long enough, it won’t be noticed, Serena had told him, but the prey eventually flinches, and when it does the eagle always sees it.

  When Pemberton arrived at the sheriff’s office, Bowden told him that Campbell’s brother had left but that the Nashville detective and McDowell remained at the café.

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “No,” Pemberton said. “This won’t take long.”

  Pemberton walked across the street to the café. He’d thought McDowell might go quietly, in part because the day he’d been forced to resign McDowell simply left his keys and badge and state-issue pistol on the office desk, his uniform hung neatly on the coat rack. There’d been no curses or threats, no calls to a congressman or senator. The man had simply walked out, leaving the door wide open.

  Coldfield and McDowell were in the back booth, green coffee cups in front of them. Pemberton pulled a chair from the closest table and sat down. He turned to the man sitting opposite McDowell.

  “Detective Coldfield, my name is Pemberton.”

  Pemberton held out his hand, and the detective looked at it as if he’d been offered a piece of rancid meat.

  “I talked to Lieutenant Jacoby half an hour ago,” Pemberton said, lowering his hand. “He and I have some mutual friends.”

  A waitress approached with her pencil and pad but Pemberton waved her away.

  “Lieutenant Jacoby said you should call him immediately. Do you need me to write down his telephone number for you?”

  “I know his number,” Coldfield said tersely.

  “There’s a telephone in the sheriff’s office across the street, detective,” Pemberton said. “Just tell Sheriff Bowden you have my permission to make the call.”

  Coldfield got up without comment. Pemberton watched through the window as the detective walked across the street and into the sheriff’s office. Pemberton pulled his chair back a few inches and studied McDowell, who stared where Coldfield had sat. McDowell seemed to be studying a small tear in the booth’s padding. Pemberton placed his hands on the table and clasped them, spoke quietly.

  “You know where that Harmon girl and the child are, don’t you?”

  McDowell turned and stared at Pemberton. The ex-lawman’s amber eyes registered incredulity.

  “Do you think I’d tell you if I did?”

  Pemberton took the envelope from his back pocket and laid it on the table.

  “That’s three hundred dollars. It’s for her and the child.”

  McDowell stared at the envelope but didn’t pick it up.

  “I don’t want to know where they are,” Pemberton said, sliding the envelope toward McDowell as he might a playing card. “Take it. You know they’ll need it.”

  “Why should I believe this isn’t a trick to find out where they are?” McDowell asked.

  “You know I had nothing to do with what happened on Colt Ridge,” Pemberton said.

  McDowell hesitated a few moments longer, then took the envelope and placed it in his pocket.

  “This doesn’t change anything between us.”

  “No, nothing changes between you and me,” Pemberton said, looking toward the entrance. “You’ll soon enough see the truth of that.”

  The bell on the café door rang and Coldfield walked toward them, but the detective didn’t sit down or look at either man.

  “Lieutenant Jacoby’s decided I should let Sheriff Bowden take care of the investigation on this end.”

  Coldfield raised his eyes, met Pemberton’s gaze.

  “I will tell you one thing, Mr. Pemberton. Campbell’s brother has been at the station every day since his brother got killed, which is why I’m here in the first place. He won’t give up.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Pemberton said.

  The detective tossed a quarter beside his coffee cup. The silver rang hollowly against the formica surface.

  “I’ll be on my way now,” Coldfield said.

  Pemberton nodded, and stood up to leave as well.

  “YOU’D a thought at least the women and children was safe,” Henryson said on Sunday afternoon as Snipes’ crews sat on the commissary steps.

  “It ain’t enough that they killed an old woman,” Snipes said. “Now they’re after that girl and her child.”

  Henryson nodded.

  “The wonder of it is they don’t kill us, just for practice.”

  “They’s content to let the saws and axes and falling limbs kill us off,” Ross said. “Frees up Galloway to do his traveling.”

  The men sat in silence a few moments, listening to a guitar strum the last notes of “Barbara Allen.” The song’s plaintive refrain put the men in a pensive mood.

  “Campbell’s brother is in town,” Ross said. “I seen him my ownself the other day.”

  “The
one Campbell was staying with in Nashville?” Henryson asked.

  “That one, the guitar picker. He was out on the courthouse steps telling how he come home from his show and found Campbell laying in bed with a hatchet back of his head. To hear tell how deep that blade was in him, you’d think Campbell’s head was no more than a pumpkin.”

  “That’s a terrible way to die,” Henryson said.

  “Better than what Doctor Cheney got,” Snipes said.

  “Campbell at least got the record for getting farthest before Galloway caught up with him,” Ross said. “Hell, Campbell even made it out of the state. I reckon that’s a sort of victory.”

  “For sure,” Henryson said. “Harris didn’t even make it out of his house.”

  “Proves one thing, though,” Ross said. “One day’s head start ain’t enough.”

  “No, it ain’t,” Henryson agreed. “I’d say you’d likely need at least a week to even get betting odds.”

  “The Harmon girl and her young one likely won’t get that,” Ross said. “Vaughn might though. Even Galloway can’t be in two places at once.”

  “That boy always had a good head on his shoulders,” Snipes said. “He figured the right time to take off.”

  “Just like quail,” Ross said. “They figure if they all flush in different directions there’s a chance one of them will make it.”

  “Has Galloway started after anybody yet?” Stewart asked.