The Code of the Hills

by Nancy Allen

  “Come on. I’ll buy you a burger. Let’s go beard the lion in his den.”

  Groaning, Elsie hauled herself out of the car. She was being silly. Nobody at Baldknobbers cared about last Friday. It was ancient history. As she neared the front door, she spied a red Camaro occupying two parking spots: Noah’s car. She felt a twinge of guilt; she hadn’t called to touch base since Wednesday morning, when the Taney case blew up. Surely he’d understand that she was consumed by work.

  The two women walked inside and paused for a moment to check the place out. Baldknobbers was an old dive, the kind of bar that covered the windows so the light of day could never shine in. It had a working jukebox, which would obligingly play a tune for a quarter; of course, the musical selections were sadly out of date. The smell of frying hamburger mingled with cigarette smoke. Baldknobbers was permitted by city ordinance to have smoking on the premises only so long as it had more revenue from liquor sales than food sales, and the owners were careful to keep that ratio in line.

  Tina looked for a table while Elsie scoured the room for Noah. Tina tugged at her arm and pointed out a booth by the kitchen. As Elsie followed, she spied him.

  He was at the pool table. His back was to her and he was in his civvies, but she’d know him if he was dressed for Halloween. The light overhead glinted on his hair, and his back and shoulders in a red flannel shirt looked good enough to eat. Just as her face broke into a welcoming smile, she recognized the woman next to him: Paige. From the crime lab. Paige glimpsed her and did a double take, then had the nerve to give her the hairy eyeball.

  Elsie lifted her chin with a jerk. Marching up to Noah, she tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, there,” she said.

  He grazed her cheek with a kiss. “Hey. Stranger.”

  She didn’t rise to the bait; she had nothing to apologize for. “What’s up?”

  “Playing pool. Me and Paige.” He bent over the table and studied the eight ball.

  Elsie pressed her lips together, reflecting that she was experiencing déjà vu. Hadn’t they had this very encounter less than a week ago? As she shot a glance at his pool partner, she saw Paige smirk. Elsie turned on her heel. “Have fun,” she said without a backward look.

  As she scooted into the booth across from Tina, the barmaid, Dixie, came up to the table. “Now what can I get for you ladies?” she asked.

  I want gin, Elsie thought. Tanqueray.

  “What kind of wine do you have by the glass?” Tina asked.

  “Box,” Dixie answered.

  Tina looked at Elsie to see whether someone was pulling her leg. But Elsie was focused on her own order: Bombay. Beefeater. It would be medicinal.

  “I’ll have a Bud Lite,” said Tina. “Thanks.”

  The smell of the grill reminded Elsie that she hadn’t eaten all day. Sighing, she said, “I better have a cheeseburger.” With a sidelong glance at the pool table, she added, “With onion.”

  “You want a beer, honey?”

  She struggled with her response. “I want a Coke. A real Coke, not diet.” She didn’t want to get all ginned up while Noah acted the pool hustler with Paige. No telling what she might do or say.

  Dixie jotted it down. “Sounds like a party,” she said, and gave the table a quick swipe with a rag before she walked off.

  While Elsie made a stack of the cardboard coaster squares, she kept a stoic face. She vowed she would not turn her head to check on Noah and Paige. Not gonna do it.

  Tina got down to business. “How do you think the case looks?”

  Elsie grimaced. “Could be better. But incest cases are tough; that’s the way it always goes. Tangled family relationships, family secrets, busting that code of silence.” Leaning back, she looked at Tina. “How on earth did you get them to talk in the first place?”

  “Funny thing. We’d smelled a rat over at the Taneys’ for years, but no one would admit to it. Donita always said everything was fine.”

  “And this time?”

  Tina rubbed her nose reflectively. “I’m not sure, exactly. After the brother made the police report and I was called in, they were all ready to talk about it. Charlene, Kristy, Mom, all three of them.”

  “What about Tiffany?”

  “No. Not Tiffany. How are you going to get Tiffany to testify for you?”

  When Detective Ashlock had tried to take Tiffany’s statement on Wednesday, he could not cajole her into uttering a single word. Tina took over but didn’t achieve any better results. Even when they picked up the broken dolls in the room and played with the child, she would not speak. Taking Tiffany by the hand, Elsie began to question her, but when she asked the child about her father, Tiffany hid her face on her knees and wouldn’t look up until she backed off.

  When they asked Donita about Tiffany’s silence, the mother feigned ignorance, said she didn’t understand what they meant because Tiffany talked to her all the time. “A chatterbox,” her mother called her. Tiffany had smiled and climbed onto her mother’s lap.

  “I’m at a loss,” Elsie said. “Why do you think Tiffany won’t talk around us?” She heard a peal of laughter from the pool table then. Don’t look don’t look don’t look, she told herself.

  Tina said, “Could be she’s a little addled. Or maybe the kid has been ordered to keep the abuse a secret for so long that she opts to be mute outside of the family, just to play it safe.”

  Elsie thought that made sense. “We’ll never get her on the stand,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll bet you never get a statement from her for the Social Ser­vices file. Good thing the other girls are willing to talk.”

  She leaned across the table and continued in a low voice. “But I’ve got to find out what the deal is with Charlene and those accusations at school. Do you know what the defense attorney is talking about? Because I’ll need to suck the poison on that.”

  As Tina shook her head, a cheer erupted from the crowd now gathered around the pool table. Elsie started to turn toward the noise, then caught herself. Deliberately, she stirred her Coke with the straw and asked Tina, “How’s work?”

  “Swamped.”

  “Worse than usual?”

  “January’s always a big month for abuse and neglect referrals.”

  Elsie took a gulp of Coke. “Why’s that?”

  “Winter is hard, hardest on poor ­people. Everybody’s cooped up together in the cold, they start drinking, doing drugs; things get ugly. God, we see a lot of it in McCown County.”

  “Yep,” she agreed. She had seen evidence of that.

  Tina leaned back in the booth, shaking her head sadly. “We’ve got one of the highest rates of child abuse in the state. Higher than St. Louis or Kansas City.”

  “Who’s highest?”

  “Greene County, just a stone’s throw from here.”

  “That’s Springfield,” Elsie said, adding, “Queen City of the Ozarks.”

  “We’re right behind them. The other hot spot is the Bootheel.”

  Elsie frowned, trying to make sense of the numbers. “I don’t understand why southern Missouri has more child abuse than the urban areas in the state.”

  “Well, there’s meth. And poverty. And domestic violence, all tied up with patriarchy. The idea that wives and daughters are chattel.” Tina leaned across the table, staring intently through her glasses. “In the hill country, ­people have hung onto some misguided notions of what they have the right to do with their children.” When Elsie didn’t respond, Tina added, with a sigh, “You crazy hillbillies.”

  “Hey. Watch it. My ­people settled this state.”

  “Impressive.”

  “It’s true. Came here in a wagon in the 1820s.”

  Tina gave her a wicked grin. “Are you bragging or complaining?”

  “So if you think it’s such a sewer here in Missouri, how did you end up here? You’re from Michigan,
right?”

  Tina said, “In my youth, I wanted to save the world through print media. So I decided to go to the best journalism school I could afford.”

  Elsie made a cocky face. “That would be Mizzou.”

  “Yeah, really. Imagine my surprise: the first J school in the world was in Columbia, Mo.”

  “So then what? You realized journalism is a dying profession?”

  “Not exactly. I had a sociology professor who convinced me to check out the social work program. That maybe I could save the world one family at a time.”

  “How’s that working out?”

  Tina laughed. “Depends on when you ask me. Some days I wish I had stayed with the news.”

  Dixie arrived with the food and drink. Elsie squirted mustard and ketchup on her burger, arranged the red onion neatly atop the meat patty, and took a hearty bite. Tina sipped from the beer bottle and asked, “About the case: what are you going to do with the mother?”

  Elsie swallowed. “She’s a can of worms. I have to use her, no way around it. She can corroborate Charlene and Kristy, and I need that. We don’t have any physical evidence; you know how incest cases are.”

  Tina nodded. ­“People don’t get it, unless they’ve seen it from the law enforcement perspective.”

  “Lord, no. A prosecution like Taney is the toughest case to make. We’ve got no DNA evidence, because the report is invariably made weeks or months after the fact. We’ve got no disinterested eyewitnesses, because the crime is committed in secret. We’ve got no forensic evidence to offer, like blood or hair or prints, because the defendant lives with the victim, so of course his fingerprints are in the home.”

  Tearing into the bag of chips that accompanied the burger, Elsie shook her head ruefully. “Our main evidence is the word of a traumatized child, and the only supporting evidence we can hope for is the corroboration of family members, ­people who’ll say, ‘This is what I saw.’ So I’ll put Donita on the stand. The jury will hate her, though.”

  “Will the jury associate Donita with Taney?”

  “Well, the fact that Donita is cooperating with the police and the prosecution helps, but her prior complicity with her husband is a problem. The jury will wonder why Donita would stand by and let Kris Taney do those things.” Elsie sighed and rattled the ice cubes in her glass. “I can’t fathom it myself. What happened to the maternal instinct? Where was the enraged mother bear that fights to protect her cub?”

  “It’s not that unusual,” said Tina. “You see it all the time in my line of work. She was afraid of him. Dependent upon him. You should have seen her when I first talked to her about him. Shaking, looking over her shoulder, like he might appear at any moment and jump on her. Honestly, I think he scares the shit out of her. Got to give her some credit for cooperating with us now.”

  “Is that why the girls are still at home? I know you could’ve taken protective custody when the case broke.”

  Tina took another pull on the beer bottle. “Sure we could’ve. And then what? Where we going to put them? We’re going begging for foster care in McCown County. And institutional care is not a happy ending, I promise.”

  Elsie had to acknowledge that Tina was right. Foster homes in McCown County were scarce as hens’ teeth. Because of that, the juvenile judge was adamant about keeping children with family members, if it was a workable solution at all.

  Tina leaned in close to Elsie and said in a hushed voice, “You’re too young to remember, but they used to let any asshole in the county be a foster parent. Any shithead who signed on the line. Then, after that case north of Branson happened, everything changed.”

  “You mean where the foster parents beat the baby to death?”

  Tina nodded. “Our judge is very careful about farming them out now. He wants to keep families intact. Blood relatives.”

  Elsie took another bite. “Damn, this case is sure enough full of crazy shit. What’s up with this ‘Our Earthly Fathers’ thing?”

  “Another caseworker was telling me something about that group lately, but this is the first time I’ve encountered them in the flesh.”

  “Well,” Elsie said, “I’m not going to borrow any trouble about it. Looks like it’s just one or two guys.”

  Tina said, “I wouldn’t discount them altogether. They made for trouble in a case a while back, where the wife had a restraining order. They showed up in a group with the husband when he contested it. Shook the woman up so much, she backed off.”

  “Why didn’t I hear about that?”

  “It was the next county over, I think.”

  The cheeseburger was reduced to crumbs aside a wilted lettuce leaf on the oval stoneware plate. Dixie popped by to pick it up. “Your drinks okay?”

  Tina asked for an iced tea, while Elsie ordered another Coke. When the drinks arrived, Elsie drank hers slowly, focusing on her friend, taking care to avoid looking around the bar. She was not going to indulge another fit of pique from Noah. Ignoring him would do him good.

  Apparently he had other ideas. Glancing toward the other side of the room, Tina told her, “Somebody’s trying to catch your eye, I think.”

  Elsie tied a paper napkin into a knot and smoothed it down. “That right?”

  “I’m serious; it’s some fine-­looking guy. Won’t you even take a peek?”

  “Nope. Tell me about your wedding plans.”

  “Joanie and I are having the ceremony in March. The pastor at your parents’ church is going to preside.”

  “He’s pretty cool,” Elsie said.

  “It’s the only church in town that welcomed us,” Tina confided, and went on to describe floral arrangements and punch recipes until Elsie broke in to announce a bathroom break.

  Heading to the ladies’ room, she took care to stay out of Noah’s path. She peed quickly, dashed soap and water on her hands, and checked her appearance for a split second. When she opened the door, Noah was waiting for her.

  She paused for a moment, flustered, then conjured a careless smile, mouthed a silent Hi and moved to scoot past him.

  Noah blocked her and took her arm. “Hey, Elsie, what’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Aren’t you even going to come over and see me?”

  “You’re staying pretty busy.”

  In the narrow path leading to the men’s room, a gray-­haired patron grew impatient. “You lovers is blocking the shithouse door,” the old salt barked. Blushing, Elsie pushed by him and hurried back to her table.

  Scooting into the booth across from Tina, she said. “Sorry about that. Where were we?”

  “They’re playing your song,” Tina said, and sure enough, Elsie heard the opening strains of a familiar melody. “Your cheatin’ heart,” Hank Williams crooned. Oh, great, she thought. Perfect.

  Tina nodded. “Your fave, right? You told me one time he was a natural poet.”

  “Well, he did have a grasp of the human condition,” Elsie said. Maybe she would have a beer. It wasn’t natural, listening to Hank without a drink.

  Tina picked up the tab. “My treat,” she said. “Back in a minute.”

  As Tina walked off, Elsie caught sight of an angry-­looking redneck making his way toward her. The man walked straight up to the table and placed his hands on it, then leaned in toward her and said, “Your name’s Arnold, right?” It was not a friendly greeting.

  “It is,” she said levelly. He looked like a rough character. He was medium height, and his sleeveless sweatshirt revealed a fondness for body building and body art. His brown hair was as long as hers, braided into a tight plait that hung down the middle of his back. The bill of his ball cap was pulled down so low that it nearly covered his eyes. When he spoke again, Elsie saw that one of his front teeth was missing.

  “I come over here to tell you,” he said, his eyes squinting under the bill of his cap, “you’re
a goddamned bitch.”

  Elsie’s cortisol spiked as she realized she’d landed in yet another altercation. Hoping to discourage it, she shifted in the booth to put her back to the man.

  “I’m talking to you,” he said, his voice growing louder as he became more agitated. “You’re the fucking bitch who put my brother away last year for DWI third and you’re a lying whore.”

  “I’m not talking to you about this,” Elsie said, but he was scaring her. Her eyes darted to the pool table, but Noah was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’d like to know what kind of person puts ­people in jail for drinking, then comes to a bar.”

  “I’m not drinking,” she said curtly, thankful that on this occasion no telltale glass or bottle sat before her. But her heart hammered in her chest. Family members of defendants sometimes wanted to challenge the prosecutor, but it generally happened in the courtroom, where the bailiff could keep matters under control. In a barroom, she was vulnerable and exposed, but it wouldn’t do to let him know she was afraid. She put her hands in her lap, and though her expression was nonchalant, her body trembled as she waited for the tirade to end.

  “Don’t want to talk now? You don’t want to talk to me?” He got right up in her face. From the terrible stench of stale liquor, he must have been drinking all day. “You’re the reason he’s doing time. I think I’m gonna whup your ass.”

  Then in a blurred instant he was gone, swung backward over a table and onto the floor. She watched in shock as Noah jerked him up off the floor by the front of his sweatshirt and said, “Outside, dirtbag.”

  “This got nothing to do with you,” the man choked out as he struggled to escape Noah’s grasp. Noah grabbed his pigtail and used it as additional leverage to usher the man to the door.

  She stared after them, relief washing over her. “Dear God,” she said softly.

  Tina ran to her side, saying, “What the hell was that?” Sliding into the booth, she reached out and took Elsie’s hand, while Dixie bustled up to get the lowdown.

  Elsie’s heart rate was returning to normal when the front door opened and Noah walked back in. He came up to the table and said, “He’s cuffed outside. Do you want me to take him in?”