by Ninie Hammon
“You bump along through life with the world operating today the same way it did yesterday and the day before,” Cotton said. “And you never think about the functioning of ordinary reality. It is what it is. And then one day reality jumps the rails and goes off in a whole new direction, and you’re left standing there, stunned, wondering … what just happened here?”
“Where is my wife? My little girl?” Stuart ground the words out between clenched teeth. “This can’t be happening.”
Gratefully, Cotton didn’t look away from the road when he responded this time, like maybe he didn’t want to make eye contact. “I suspect they are wherever Thelma is. And where everybody else in Nower County is.”
“And where’s that?”
He did shoot Stuart a look this time and his voice was anguished. “I’ve spent the past two weeks banging my head against the wall trying to figure that out.” He looked back at the road. “But according to what your wife wrote on that blackboard, Abby Clayton’s not there anymore … wherever ‘there’ is. She’s dead.”
“Died … of what? And is that it, do you think? The houses that are suddenly old. Are the people who lived there … dead?”
Stuart could launch that out there into the air between them because Cotton’s house and Charlie’s mother’s house were untouched. But what if they returned to them after they visited Shep and found them old, dilapidated? What did that mean? He shook off the thought — and yawned to pop his ears. Changes in elevation plugged Stuart’s ears so severely it sometimes took him a whole day after an airplane trip to hear properly. The up and down of the mountains was driving him nuts.
The house where Cotton pulled over … it appeared that the ravages of time had eaten out its heart and left nothing but a shattered ruin behind. Cotton said it was inside that ruin that Shep and Abby Clayton had lived, that Shep had driven away from that house one morning to go to Lexington to stay with his newborn son overnight while his wife came home. The Claytons told Cotton that Shep’d about had to hogtie Abby to get her to leave her baby’s side even for a few hours. Shep had wanted her to get a good night’s sleep because the baby wouldn’t likely let her get much rest for a while. She never showed up. And when Shep and his baby son came “home” without her, the ruin was what the man found sitting where his house had been.
No wonder he had lost it. How did you leave a normal house and come home the next day and find this and still keep all your marbles?
There was a battered old car with missing wheels in the front yard up on concrete blocks, so ancient and rusted it was impossible to determine the make or the model. The trunk lid was held down with a piece of wire, and one back window had a piece of cardboard duct-taped in place to cover where the glass was missing.
“His mama told me that when he got home and found his house like this, he started howling, and I don’t have any trouble believing that. She said the sound went on and on, like nothing she had ever heard in her life. Then he’d turned and kicked in the back door of his brother’s car, just stood there slamming his foot into it again and again.”
“Surely, he hasn’t been living here.”
“The Claytons and the Letchers are big families spread out all over the mountains in Poorfolk and Sawmill Hollows, which bump up against the Beaufort County line. A handful of Shep and Abby’s relatives — brothers, uncles, cousins — live on the other side of the line and nothing happened to them. Shep and the baby, name’s Cody, have been staying at his parents’ house. They have a double-wide trailer on the Beaufort County side of Sharptop Mountain. Not an ideal situation.”
“I’ve never seen a trailer house I thought was an ‘ideal situation.’”
It was possible more people in the mountains lived in trailer houses than in ordinary houses, at least judging from what Stuart had seen. You could see them perched on the mountainsides, with winding dirt lanes leading up to them he couldn’t imagine would be passible in the wintertime. They all looked like they were affixed to the mountainsides with white stick pins — satellite dishes. Charlie had told him once the satellite dish was the state flower of West Virginia and he could see why that was.
“Shep’s father has MS and is in a wheelchair and he has a handicapped brother who also lives there. But apparently, Shep gets up every morning and ignores the baby, just gets somebody to bring him here and he sits all day in the ruin. He’d probably just stay here if his people didn’t come every day to take him home.”
“His people.” Charlie had called her family that, too.
“Some of them tried to stay with him, keep him company, but he told them all to go away, that he wanted to be alone. His mama said when they come get him, he doesn’t argue, goes right along, then he gets up the next morning and comes right back.”
Cotton took in a deep breath and opened his car door. “Let’s go see if he’s any more lucid than he was the last time I saw him.”
He wasn’t.
The roof of the house had caved in on one side, taking one wall on the front with it. It was not a structure that looked stable enough to venture into. Cotton led them around to the back where a part of a wall was missing forming an opening into the remains of a bedroom. The frame of a bed sat there, with a clump of rotted fabric and stuffing on top of rusty springs. Shep sat in a lawn chair, collapsible, that Cotton said Shep’s mother had put there. Before that, he’d just been sitting on the floor.
Stuart’s first impression of Shepherd Clayton was that he looked like pictures he’d seen of the people in Nazi concentration camps when they were liberated by the American soldiers. Not just that he was thin way past the point of being gaunt, with too-long dark hair hanging in his eyes. The resemblance was in the look on his face — blank and haunted, hollow-eyed and hopeless. Shepherd Clayton had looked into the abyss. And the abyss had looked back.
“How ya doing today?” Cotton asked and it took a moment for Shep to come back from wherever he’d been and focus on Cotton. It wasn’t until then that he noticed Stuart. When he did, his look turned hard.
“Who’s this? What’s he doing here?”
“This is Stuart McClintock. You remember Charlie Ryan — she’d have been a lot older than you, but she went to school here. Stuart’s her husband. Her mother was Sylvia Ryan, gave ceramics classes in her garage at the foot of Little Bear Mountain.”
There was some recognition in that, like he at least had heard of Sylvia Ryan.
“He’s black,” Shep said, the tone of voice carrying with it his disapproval.
“I’m black, too,” said Cotton, trying to turn Shep’s remark from an insult into merely an observation.
“You didn’t marry no white woman,” Shep said. But even his bigotry was off, unfocused, somehow didn’t sound genuine. It was like he was playing the part of Shepherd Clayton — who was a racist and would have said a thing like that — but in reality was somebody else entirely. “What’s he want?”
“He’s looking for his wife, too. Just like I’m looking for mine and you’re looking for yours. We came out to talk to you because we thought we could help each other. If we put our heads together, maybe we could find—”
“I ain’t trying to find nobody. I ain’t looking for Abby no more. I found her.”
Stuart’s heart began to hammer in his chest. Found her? If Charlie’s calendar was accurate, Abby had died and been buried more than a week ago. If Shep found her … was she dead or alive?
As if to answer his question, Shep said, “My Abby’s fine.”
“Fine?” Cotton’s voice was strained.
“Just fine. She said she’s doing alright where she is and told me not to go poking around looking for her, that she’d come on back home to me and Cody when the Jabberwock was done with her.”
“What’s … the Jabberwock?” Cotton asked, but Shep blew by the question and looked at Stuart.
“The Jabberwock told Abby he don’t like it, folks sticking their noses into some’m ain’t none of their concern. Folks who ain’t got n
o right to be here in the first place.”
“Who’s the Jabberwock?” Stuart asked.
“Ain’t none of your business!” Shep snapped and there was a light in his eyes, like somebody was home in there now. “You hadn’t ought to cross the Jabberwock.” His eyes were piercing. “You mess with him, he’ll mess with you. And you’ll wish you never set foot in Nowhere County.”
There was an otherworldly creepiness to this conversation that far out-distanced the nature of the craziness they were discussing. And Stuart began to feel that “too closeness,” the sense that there wasn’t enough air in the room, though there was a hole you could drive a forklift through in the wall. But instead of being frightened of yet another display of Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Stuart felt a flash of anger.
“You tell Abby to give Mr. Jabberwock a message from me. Tell him I’m not going anywhere until I find my wife and daughter.”
Shep just looked at him, but somehow his look shifted when he did, and when he spoke it didn’t sound menacing. In fact, it felt like Stuart was having a real conversation for the first time since he got here. Shepherd looked up at him through the shock of dirty brown hair hanging over his forehead with amusement in his eyes, like somebody who has seen the dude warming up on the other side of the ring and knows you’re about to get knocked on your can.
“A person hadn’t ought to stay somewhere they ain’t wanted, and don’t nobody want you here. Not Charlie and Merrie. Not nobody. You best leave.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “While you still can.”
Stuart and Cotton were driving away from the crazy man in the ruins of a house and a life, before it registered with Stuart.
“How did Shepherd Clayton know my little girl’s name is Merrie?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Howie Witherspoon grunted and cursed and sweated as he dragged Hayley Norman’s body through the woods to the cliff.
He had expended a lot of energy in wild rage when he caught her, had beaten her body until it was totally unrecognizable with the stick he’d used to bash in her skull. Hit her again and again, dripping blood out his mouth onto her body.
And his thumb. It felt like she bit it off! She broke the bone, he was sure of it, but there was so much blood and it was too dark to see …
He could only imagine what his face looked like now. Scratched, broken nose … and she had broken off one of his front teeth, too, when she kicked him. He could feel the jagged edge with his tongue. What could he do? There wasn’t a single dentist in Nower County. Recognition of his injuries, of how he must look, sent him into such a fury he almost stopped dragging her, wanted to pick up a rock or a stick and attack her body, beat her—
No, she was dead. And he needed all his strength to drag the sow’s fat carcass to the edge of the cliff and toss her over.
He hadn’t played it right, should have sweet-talked her into standing with him at the edge of the cliff so one shove would have done it. He’d been looking forward to hearing her scream all the way down. But he’d shown his cards too soon. Unless the filthy pig had been lying, she hadn’t told anybody but Sam Sheridan she was pregnant — and Sam couldn’t tell anybody, he didn’t think. Wouldn’t that be a violation of privacy? And the ugly cow had said she had told no one who was the father of the baby. Yet. She’d have spilled it, though, sooner or later, and statutory rape was still a crime in Kentucky. He’d looked it up. The age of consent was sixteen IF the partner was less than five years older than the girl. He was more than twenty years older and she hadn’t yet turned sixteen that first time. It was right before her birthday. Her pious preacher father wouldn’t have rested until Howie was in prison for life.
Howie shuddered. Physically repulsed by the thought of having sex with the bag of blubber he was dragging along by her hair and one arm. It was her fault, of course. She’d said she was on the pill and he didn’t have any reason to doubt her. Looking back, she might have stopped taking the pill and gotten pregnant on purpose, to trap him. That first time — she’d been crying and he did feel genuinely sorry for her, and he’d held her … the feel of her body aroused him. Certainly not the sight of it. A man could fall off into that pile of fat and never find his way out again.
He might acknowledge some partial responsibility for that first time but what happened after that first time was not Howie’s fault!
She would not leave him alone. Called him, showed up at the Dollar Store, waited until all the other customers left, then tried to get him to have sex with her, rubbing up against him — right there in the store. Apparently the danger of discovery was part of the turn-on for her. She had called his house one time too many, though, and Edna got suspicious. And when that witch had a bur under her saddle, there was no turning her aside. She always wanted to play the victim, the “poor-me,” and the victim points a wife got when her husband cheated on her — with an underage girl! — Edna could bank those and draw interest the rest of her life.
They’d got into it the night before J-Day, one of the worst fights they’d ever had. He’d beat the crap out of her while the wind from that creepy storm raged outside. But she kept coming. It wasn’t his fault she was dead. If she’d just let it be … but no. Women were like that. All women, a bunch of fat whores the lot of them.
So then he’d had to figure out what to do with the body. He had been scared spit-less he’d get caught, and where he put her wasn’t a good place to stash a body but he hadn’t had any time to plan it out. Then the Jabberwock had swooped in to save the day, solving all his problems. Howie had put it out there that Edna’d gone shopping in Richmond with her sister, got caught “on the other side.” Bada boom, bada bing — game over.
The problem of Hayley Whaley, as the other kids called her, wasn’t quite as easy. But if he could just get her gargantuan blob of blubber off the cliff, he’d be safe. She had asked Sam to perform an abortion and Sam had refused. Then Hayley would just disappear, would vanish. And by the time somebody stumbled over her rotting corpse a month or two from now, they’d figure she threw herself off the cliff in a fit of despair, a pregnant teenager, the daughter of a minister. Nobody’d question it.
So how was he to explain his own injuries? Claw marks down the side of his face, his mouth a ruin? His thumb! By the time her body was discovered, he’d be healed enough nobody would connect his injuries to her death. He’d claim that … he had fallen, slipped and tumbled down a hillside.
But the blood all over him! He had beaten her and beaten her and … He had to get home and out of these bloody clothes before anybody saw him.
Toby. Crap. The kid was home. Grant Jeffrey’s mother had surely dropped Toby off by now, and Howie had never dreamed he’d be gone so long the boy would come home to an empty house. Well, he was eight years old, for crying out loud. Surely an eight-year-old was old enough to look after himself for a couple of hours. But Toby would be there when Howie got home. Would see the state of his clothing and what the fat slob had done to his face. There wasn’t any way to hide it.
Well, then, that’s the way it was. He’d tell Toby he’d been in an accident and the blood was his, and he tell the kid to keep his mouth shut, not tell anybody what he saw. The kid would do what he was told; he had seen what his father had done to his mother so he knew better than to cross him. Toby’d be fine.
He had finally dragged the body out of the woods. With no flashlight in the dark woods, he had tripped twice and almost broke his own neck. He dragged the body to the very edge of the cliff, kinda balanced her on her side, then stood, spit on her and shoved the body backward with his foot. And she was gone. It was too dark now to see where the body’d landed but it didn’t matter. You couldn’t jump off the Scott’s Ridge Cliff and survive, no matter where you landed.
Hurriedly cleaned up around the picnic table, scuffling the drag marks the body’d made in the dirt in front of the cliff. The floor of the woods was covered with leaves and sticks and crap. There’d be no discernible drag trail there.
The
re was just one more thing left to do. He went as fast as he could to the clearing where the people who came to the overlook parked their cars. Hayley’s father’s car was parked beside his own. Opening the driver’s side door, he leaned in and picked up her purse, opened it and found what he was hoping was still stuffed inside. The envelop of money he’d given her to pay for the abortion. Having to scratch together that kind of cash on short notice was part of what had gotten Edna’s panties all in a wad, part of what had started that last fight.
Last fight. He was rid of Edna. And Hayley. He’d even gotten his money back, but the price he had paid and would continue to pay was waaaay more than the fat blob was worth. She had hurt him bad. He’d determined not to look in the mirror of the car, to wait until he got home to see the damage. Rage washed through him and out the other side.
Right now, his priority was getting home without anyone seeing him, getting cleaned up and seeing to his wounds. And Toby, of course. The kid was supposed to be in bed by now, should be sound asleep. And if he wasn’t … Howie would make him wish he had been.
Chapter Thirty-Two
As they left the collapsed house where Shep Clayton sat, an old pickup truck turned in the lane and Cotton waved at the driver. He waved back.
“Shep’s brother,” Cotton said, “coming to get him and take him back to his mother’s house.”
Cotton drove the winding mountain roads in the dark as confidently as he had done in broad daylight. The two were silent. Seen through the clear mountain air, the stars twinkled big as chunks of ice floating in the sea of ink above their head.
