by Ninie Hammon
Cotton saw it.
“This will be like that. It will totally creep you out. But a picture is worth a thousand words, saves a lot of explaining.” He handed him the pen. “Write a note to yourself. Put down the time and the date and then jot down — just a couple of sentences — what you’ve seen in the past couple of hours.”
“But why—?”
“Just do it. Humor me.”
Stuart took the paper and pen and jotted down the empty houses, the old shacks, and the man who disappeared after he blew a hole in the road. It was hard to make himself put down the part about the note to Charlie that had vanished but he forced himself to do it.
He held out the paper to Cotton, who held up his hand and shook his head.
“It’s not for me. It’s for you. I want you to put that in your shirt pocket.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Just do it! I don’t have the energy to argue with you.”
Stuart folded the paper and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
Cotton started the car and pulled out of the parking place.
“Where are we going now?”
“To my house to get your car so you can drive us to Carlisle, the county seat of Beaufort County.” Cotton paused. “Well, at least part of the way there.”
Chapter Twelve
Liam was on his way from Reece Tibbits’s house to talk to Reece’s mother, Grace. And how was he going to tell her what he’d found at Reece’s place? The woman was dying! How could he tell her that something totally impossible had happened? She wouldn’t believe him, he didn’t think, and then he’d have to take her there and show her. He was not looking forward to that.
What was happening?
Of course, that was the essential question about everything in life these days. What was happening?
How could Reece Tibbits’s house have … have aged, turned into a dilapidated pile of rotting timber when yesterday it had been …
Where was Cissy? Reece’s wife was a quiet woman. Liam wouldn’t use the word mousey but everybody else did. And in truth it fit. She was small, unassuming, with her shoulders hunched most of the time and her eyes averted. He had never heard her say more than two or three words at a stretch, though he understood from Reece’s drinking buddies that he complained about her incessant whining, nagging him to do first one thing and then another until he retreated to his woodshop, the only place he could go to be free of her because she was allergic to sawdust.
Where was she?
And the girls? Reece had two daughters, teenagers, as quiet and unassuming as their mother. Where were Sue-Sue and Patty?
“Unit two, this is dispatch, come back,” came the words out of his radio. Seriously. Unit two? There were no units one or three or four or … he was the only unit, but Betty Greenleaf was … best described as the star of her own movie.
“This is Unit two.”
“Unit two … we have a reported code ten, eight, seven at 1235 Sugarloaf Lane in the Ridge.” Her voice was hushed. From the gravity of the situation, of course. Unless she’d gotten her codes wrong — which she hadn’t because they hung on a chart right in front of the radio unit and she’d pronounced each number separately like she’d been trained to — then she was dispatching him to a murder scene. The tingle of excitement he heard underlying her words convinced him she hadn’t screwed up the codes, didn’t think she was telling him about a dog off the leash instead of a dead body.
“A 10-87 on Sugarloaf Lane. Copy.”
Grace Tibbits would have to wait.
When he rolled into the driveway of Martha Whittiker’s house you’d have thought the circus had come to town. Must have been a dozen people, all excited, being held back behind a makeshift police line by Homer Pettigrew, a volunteer fireman.
“Boy, am I glad to see you, Liam.” Homer handed the end of the piece of extension cord he’d stretched from Mrs. Whittiker’s back porch railing to the little cottage in her backyard. “It’s all yours.”
With that, Homer turned his back and walked away.
Liam looked around frantically, trying to find somebody responsible.
Not in this crowd. Her neighbors, mostly. Elderly people who had congregated in her yard like vultures about to pick at roadkill.
Somebody had to … he spotted Holmes Fischer at the edge of the crowd.
“Fish!” he cried.
Fish looked for a moment like he wanted to turn tail and run. He didn’t, just nodded, tried to hang a half smile on his face that fell totally off one side.
“Yeah, Liam. What can I—?”
“Come over here and take the end of this line,” Liam said, motioning with his hand. “Come on, hurry up.” Fish didn’t move any faster. Liam handed him the end of the extension cord. “Hold this. We’re all pretending this is an official police line, like the ones with the little yellow flags with the words “police line” written on them. This is all we got. You hold this and don’t let anybody through.”
Fish looked like he wanted to throw up, but he took the piece of extension cord as it occurred to Liam that it was a sad state of affairs when the most reliable person in a crowd of a dozen people was a homeless drunk.
“Okay, listen up, everybody,” Liam called out to the crowd. “I want you all to stay back, don’t get any closer—”
“They said she got her head all bashed in,” Roberta McCreedy said. “Like smashed her face. Zat true, Liam?”
He ignored her but Wilbur Berg didn’t. “I seen her body. I was the one called, Liam. She got whacked on the head alright, but didn’t bash it in. But she’s dead. Not no doubt about that. I thought she might be unconscious, then I touched her. Cold as a popsicle.”
“Musta fell down, huh, Wilbur?” Ethel Porter said.
“She didn’t fall down. Somebody cracked her on the skull!”
“We got a killer on the loose?” Wilma Thacker had a voice like a rooster. “Is that what you’re sayin’? A murderer?”
“No, I ain’t saying—”
“I don’t even lock my doors and there’s a killer out there!” Ethel Porter squeaked out the words in a half-scream. “Preys on old ladies! Oh, dear Jesus.”
“Will you all be quiet!” Liam shouted. And he was proud of how stern and official he sounded. “We don’t know how Martha Whittiker died.” He shot Wilbur Berg a look. “If she is, indeed, deceased. Let’s show a little respect for Mrs. Whittiker and not be running off at the mouth about her when you have absolutely no information.”
That shut them up. It would until he was out of sight, but that was the best he could do. He walked down the little stone path to the door of the cottage where Martha Whittiker allowed her druggie grandson to live. Word had it Dylan wasn’t just an addict but a dealer. Liam didn’t know that to be fact, but most rumors had a least a kernel of truth in them and Liam figured this one had a whole ear of corn. All of which begged the question: what possible motive could the boy have to harm his grandmother — biting the hand that feeds you and all that?
Wilbur Berg had dipped under the extension cord Liam had given to Fish and followed Liam to the door, babbling as he came.
“… asked me three days ago did I want her chest freezer and of course I said yes. Seen her car in the driveway so I knew she was home but when I knocked on her door she didn’t answer and I found her laying right where she is now.”
Liam was about to ask how Wilbur’d seen the woman on the floor in the cottage when the curtains on the windows were drawn tight shut, but Wilbur answered before he had a chance.
“Oh, I went looking everywhere — her car being in the driveway and all. Searched her house but she wasn’t nowhere, so I come here next.”
“The door to the cottage was closed, but you opened it?”
“Sure I opened it. How else could I have got inside?”
Wilbur likely saw the disapproval on Liam’s face.
“But I didn’t touch nothing, didn’t ‘contaminate the crime scene.’ I watch Hill
Street Blues.”
Well, at least he hadn’t—
“You ain’t supposed to move the body of somebody’s been murdered because you might mess up something.” Wilbur paused, then continued proudly. “So I didn’t do nothing.”
Liam had time for one breath.
“Except, you know, cover her up, of course. Couldn’t just leave her laying there like that! So I took the afghan off the couch, rolled her over and laid it down, then rolled her back and covered her. Got blood on my shoe but I wiped it off. Wasn’t hardly no blood at all but I’m squeamish so I came outside then and vomited.”
Liam felt like vomiting, too.
Still, Wilbur hadn’t dragged the team of Clydesdales and the Budweiser beer wagon through the place, so there was that.
“Looked to me like there was blood on the front door, but I knew better than to touch it. I watch all them cop shows.”
Liam glanced at the front door and saw smudges that could possibly have been blood.
On the outside of the door.
If she was murdered in the cottage, the killer might have gotten her blood on his hands and smeared it on the door when he left. But he would have smeared it on the inside of the door, not the outside. Only way there’d be blood on the outside of the door was if somebody had it on their hands going in.
Chapter Thirteen
Stuart McClintock didn’t have anything to say as he piloted his rented red Lexus away from Cotton’s house, following directions toward the county line. But the former football star was going to have plenty to say when they got back! Cotton felt a wave of pity for the man whose world Cotton was about to rock to the core.
Just like Cotton’s had been rocked two weeks ago.
He told Stuart the story, gave him the CliffsNotes, anyway. The whole story was … even now it was hard to think about.
Cotton Jackson stands in his sister-in-law’s living room in the little community of Twig — her bare living room — and shouts at the top of his lungs, “Ophelia, where are you?”
His voice is tear-clotted, doesn’t even sound like his own, and he can feel tears running down his face but he isn’t aware of crying. He has just come from the Greenleaf place, had raced down Chimney Rock Pike to his nearest neighbors. Betty Greenleaf is the dispatcher at the sheriff’s department, Arnie raises pigs. The pigs were there; Arnie and Betty and their sad-eyed little basset hound weren’t. After that he had backtracked, turned off on Elkhorn Road and stopped at the Potters’ and the Throckmortons’. Nobody was home. Becky Sue Potter is pregnant, due any day now. Sweet little Sarah Throckmorton, who looks like Tweety Bird’s grandmother, was gone — along with everything she owned. Including a whole herd of cats.
All the houses were empty. Bare. Not a stick of furniture, nothing left but the pictures on the walls.
More important than the missing furniture was the missing people.
There was nobody, not anywhere.
Everybody was gone.
“You answer me, do you hear? Stop this foolishness and answer me — Ophelia.”
Silence, a dark, heavy silence.
That’s when he loses it, his control on his emotions, allows himself to topple off the edge into hysteria. Panic.
He isn’t aware of running out to his car, of turning around and driving so fast down County Road 278 East that it’s a good thing there is no traffic because he would have run them off into a ditch.
No traffic. No traffic! He blows through the Middle of Nowhere — not a car in the Dollar General Store parking lot. Empty.
The nearest Kentucky State Police Post is #7 in Richmond. It is a forty-five-minute drive away and he could have called. But Cotton has to tell another live human being. Not make some report over the phone, but look a man in the eye and say that he needed help, that his wife was missing, that everybody in the whole county was missing with her.
He remembers little of the drive to Richmond. The post is on Eastern Bypass, not far from the campus of Eastern Kentucky University.
He leaps out of his car. Leaves his door open, can’t hold onto his terror and panic a second longer and bursts into the outer office huffing, puffing and sobbing, crying out to anybody who’ll listen. “They’re gone. All of them. Everybody’s gone.”
A gray uniformed officer is suddenly at his side, taking his arm, and it feels more like restraint than compassion so he tries to shake free.
“You got to help me, you got to come look, come see. They’re gone.”
The officer doesn’t release his grip. He’s a white man and Cotton’s rational mind, which has long since given over control of his behavior, notes the disdain in his voice that translates easily: Why should I believe a black man? Though he’s not thinking “black,” but Cotton will not allow himself even to think the n-word.
“Why don’t you sit down right over in here?” and he’s ushered by two officers, both white, into a small room with a table and Cotton wants to scream. It looks for all the world like every interrogation room in every cop show he ever saw. There’s no mirror on the wall, but there is a video camera in the corner. And only a table and straight-backed chairs. He knows he has to get a grip on his emotions, that he sounds like a lunatic, but he knows if he can just get them to listen, get them to come and see, he won’t seem like a lunatic anymore.
“Now what is your name, sir?”
“I’m Cotton Jackson and—”
“Where do you live, Mr. Jackson?”
“In Nower County,” he says, then shouts, can’t help it. “That’s where I just came from, Nower County, and nobody’s there. Everybody’s vanished.”
Shouldn’t have used the word vanished. Gone was acceptable. Missing, even. But vanished definitely slammed doors in their minds.
“What do you mean vanished?”
“How many things can vanished mean? Gone. Not there. Nobody in the county is there.”
“Sir, are you telling me—?”
He grabs hold of his emotions and with the greatest amount of restraint he has ever displayed in his whole life, he says, “Don’t listen to me. Don’t believe a word I say. Write me off as a raving lunatic … just come see for yourself. You see for yourself and you won’t have to question my sanity.”
One of the officers leaves and the other takes down Cotton’s story, which is so disjointed he wouldn’t have believed a word of it if somebody had told it to him.
The first officer returns with two more officers, one older, clearly the man in charge.
“I have raised Unit 17, Trooper Jim Burton. He’s in Beaufort County right now working a wreck, and he will get there as soon as—”
“Have I broken any laws?
It is such a non sequitur none of the officers answer.
“Because if I haven’t and you’re not putting me under arrest, then I respectfully request to be allowed to leave.”
“And go where?”
“To the FBI in Lexington. Somebody somewhere has got to listen to me and take me seriously.”
The three officers exchange a look.
“You are not in any emotional condition to drive a car right now, Mr. Jackson and—” says the officer with the blond hair, the first one, whose gold name tag on the black pocket flap of his gray uniform identifies him as Trooper J.R. Barker.
Cotton interrupts. “So you’re saying I can’t leave?”
“I am saying that you can’t drive,” says the guy in charge, Captain Tomlinson. He is a black man. Maybe that will help. “I am going to dispatch these two officers to go back home with you and investigate your claims.”
Cotton looked up at the ceiling with tears in his eyes, “Thank you Jesus,” he said.
He rides in the back seat of the sleek gray cruiser with Trooper Tomlinson. Trooper M.L. McMichael follows, in Cotton’s Chrysler. As they drive, Cotton tries to explain, as best he can, what he has seen. He has calmed down some, sounds a little less homicidal, and he can tell that the officer is at least interested. Oh, it’s clear he doesn’t believe
a thing Cotton is saying, but he is at least listening.
As soon as they cross the county line from Beaufort into Nower County, Cotton directs the officer to pull over at the first house they pass.
“Why stop here? Who are these people?”
“I don’t know who lives here, officer. I just know they’re not here. And there’s no furniture in their house either. I’ll wait here. You go see for yourself.”
The other officer pulls in behind and the two of them go up the sidewalk to the door and knock, try to raise somebody, look around the property. Cotton hears Trooper Tomlinson tell Trooper McMichael, “There’s no car here. They’re just not home.”
Cotton calls out from the back seat of the cruiser.
“Let’s try the next house, then.”
And they do. They stop at the Donaldson house — Burt’s an older man who has a young wife and a house full of little kids. But the kid paraphernalia that ought to be all over the yard — bikes and trikes and Big Wheels — is gone.
He waits in the car as the two officers go to the door. He can’t hear what they’re saying as they walk around, trying to find the Donaldsons — knocking on the back door, checking out the garage and the backyard. They don’t go inside the house because the doors are locked and they don’t have a search warrant.
Cotton can tell they’re still not buying what he’s selling.
They almost pass the next house, but Cotton directs them to stop. It’s the house belonging to Bobby Joe Mattingly, and it is a falling-down wreck.
“Surely nobody lives here,” said Trooper McMichael.
Cotton opens his mouth to tell them that yes, indeed somebody lives here, or did when he drove past the place on his way to work Saturday morning. The Mattinglys. The house had been a complete dump then, your basic Appalachian poor man’s shack complete with the requisite dead-car lawn art. But it didn’t look a hundred years old like it does now.
“Look, can we go to my house now, please,” Cotton begs. The officers confer, and then Trooper Tomlinson returns to his cruiser and directs Cotton to get out of the back seat and into his own car, that Trooper McMichael had been driving. Tomlinson gets behind the wheel.
