by Gwen Hunter
The gunpowder smell of the indoor shooting range was sharp in my nostrils. “If I practice some more—”
“You may be less life threatening to the people around you. Someday. After a few years of steady work. At least this time you didn’t hit the target to the left.”
I winced, and Jane giggled. Great. Now, I was providing comic relief. But at least my niece wasn’t so miserable anymore. Maybe next time I’d wear clown makeup and juggle the bullets rather than waste them, hitting the wall at the back of the room.
I loaded the small revolver again, inserting each brass bullet—each round, pardon me—and repositioned my ear protectors. My hands and wrists were quite strong from years of working stone, but even I could feel the recoil. I remembered Evan saying that S&W Airweights kicked like a son of a gun. He was right. I had a dull ache in both wrists.
Ignoring the spasms through my shoulders and upper back, I assumed the firing position, my feet apart and legs braced, knees not locked but firm, arms in front of me. Left hand cupping the butt of the Smith & Wesson Airweight .38, right hand steady in a two-handed grip, I pulled back the hammer. I heard a faint click and applied a hair of pressure on the trigger.
I took a breath and released it slowly. The act reminded me of my meditation ritual, and I took another breath, forcing my back and shoulders to relax. This time I found my wall, the place of stone and calm and utter aloneness. For several moments, I breathed in the emptiness of the stone and the stillness of the earth. My eyes on the target, I exhaled one last time and squeezed the trigger.
The gun exploded, then five more times in slow succession. The little six-shot emptied. I pulled off my ear protectors and squinted at the target.
“Well, blow me away with an Uzi,” Noe said, shocked. She punched a big button on the right of the booth where I stood and the target raced toward me on its complicated pulley system. On my target were five holes, each one punched through the black man-shape.
“You hit it, Aunt Tyler.”
Jane and Noe giggled and high-fived each other. I just stood there and stared at the target I had killed. I remembered my vision, the snow, the blood, Davie dead. The St. Claire nightmare that haunted me still. I shivered with cold though the room was heated.
Back at the shop, I sent Jane to the loft to put our leftovers from lunch in the fridge, and to watch an old DVD we had picked up on the way home. Hidalgo. She said it was her favorite movie of all time, and pounded up the stairs whooping with excitement.
Noe fell into a wing chair at the front of the store and stretched, patting her stomach with obvious contentment. “Oh, my God, that was fun. And that waiter was wild. Did you see the big amber earplug?”
“Hard to miss,” I said, collapsing into the chair beside hers. “A hunk of amber that big stuffed into a hole in the ear-lobe? Now that had to hurt.”
“Nah.” Noe crossed her legs, twisting her flounced granny skirt in the process. “They do it like the tribes in Africa. Start small, with a piercing, and when that heals, stuff in something a bit bigger, then gradually bigger and bigger. His was the biggest I’ve seen outside of National Geographic. Really cool.”
“Really not,” I said.
“Mail, you two.” Jubal tossed envelopes and small packages to us. Noe caught hers with one hand. Mine landed in my lap. Something shifted, went sideways and down. I was sucked down with it, down, deep and fast. A spiral, a whirlpool. Blackness closed in. Blood. So much blood. Pain. Pain. I hurtled from the chair, scattering the mail. “Noooo!”
I recoiled on the far side of the room, bouncing off the wall, and cowered there, scrunched against the corner. I slid down in a small heap of terror. Someone was screaming. Whimpering. Moaning. It was me. And I couldn’t stop.
“Tyler?” Jubal’s voice sliced through the agony.
I slapped a hand over my mouth to muffle the sound. And I stared at the packages. Three of them. Blood and pain. Davie.
“Get Evan. Get Bartlock,” I whispered. “Close the store. Quick. Noe, go to the loft. Please. Keep Jane upstairs. Don’t let her back down.” With a sudden jab, the headache was there, just over my left eye. It rammed at me, a pickax of pain. I rocked back my head, eyes closed against the shrill ache and the sight of the boxes on the floor.
I didn’t hear their responses, was aware only vaguely of movement. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was the packages, still scattered on the shop floor. I couldn’t look away. I could only stare at the packets as tears ran down my face. Davie. Oh, God. Davie. Finally my moans went silent. And then I heard only the sound of my breathing.
I don’t know how long it took Evan to get there, but he was huffing for breath when he arrived, coat lapels undone and flapping. He knelt in front of me, his hands cold on my face from an outside run. “What is it?” he asked me.
I focused on his eyes. Green, gentle. With odd color flakes in the irises, like the brown of old wood. “They cut Davie.” I was whispering, tears a solid rain down my cheeks. “They sent me pieces of him.”
“How do you know?”
“In the boxes. Pieces of Davie.”
Evan lifted me from my crouch on the floor in the corner of the shop, and carried me like a child to the chair I had vacated. He sat me in the seat and accepted a throw from Jubal. He covered me with it, tucking it around me.
From a pocket, he pulled clear vinyl gloves, a pen and a small index card, and gathered the boxes. There were four of them. “Which ones?” he asked.
I was glad, so very glad, he didn’t tell me I was being stupid or silly. Just a simple which ones? “The three in brown paper.”
He glanced at his watch. With the pen, he wrote something on the index card, then set both aside. Carefully he opened the first parcel, using a knife edge to pry off the tape and unwrap the packaging. He set the brown paper to his left and used the same knife to remove the tape from the white box.
I was suddenly aware that we were not alone. The shop was closed, with that quiet hush of after-hours, though it was still afternoon. Jubal and Isaac stood behind the counter, silent, still, watching. Jubal looked once at me, worry in his eyes. Isaac watched Evan. I suddenly knew what he was thinking, what he was feeling. I understood the conflict in Isaac’s heart. He wanted desperately to believe in something. In anything. And so he wanted there to be something awful in the boxes. And equally strongly, he wanted the boxes to hold supplies for the shop. Beads purchased on the Internet. Pearls. Sterling-silver findings. Something innocuous. Something that would reaffirm his view that the world was a logical, rational, unspiritual place. Through his own contradictory emotions ran a strong river of concern for me. I caught a quick glimpse of me though his eyes. A small bundle curled in the big chair. Helpless. Tiny. To be protected. And then I was back in my own head. The switch left me breathless. The room swam around me. I shifted my attention to Evan, who turned the box in one hand, inspecting it. Tape curled up around the edges of the lid.
Carefully he eased open the box and set it on the glass counter. Jubal and Isaac moved closer. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see their faces. Not wanting see proof of what I knew to be true. I heard a collective release of breath. And I knew.
“What is it?”
No one answered. I understood. No one could. Shaky, I rose and walked the few feet to Evan. He closed the box, pushing down on the top. With icy fingers, I stopped him. I could feel his eyes on me.
“You don’t have to see this.”
“Yes. I do.” I took the box. The top slowly came away. I looked inside, not knowing what it was. For a long moment, it was just a whitish, pinkish cone-shaped thing. And then it resolved itself into a shape I recognized. The tip of a human finger, the nail rimmed in blood. They had cut off Davie’s finger.
Something happened to me in that instant, when I saw Davie’s flesh in the box. Something twisted deep inside. I felt myself alter. I hardened, an adamantine core with wicked needle-sharp barbs solidified in the heart of me. My soul condensed and dimmed. The headach
e split me open. And the world went dark.
Cops swarmed the shop. They asked questions I couldn’t answer, questions I was too sick to answer. Evan answered for me, crafting a story that made sense out of the mail delivery, the open box, his presence. Because of the headache, I was unable to erect my wall. Through the pulse of pain that beat against me, pounding out a rhythm of agony, I caught glimpses from people in the room.
From Evan, I saw the thought that he was glad I had touched the box, that his story made sense only if my fingerprints were on the box. The thought that he was helpless to protect me. Powerless to help in the investigation. Powerless to find Davie before they tortured him again.
From Isaac, an embarrassed wonder. He kept looking at me. As if I was a lab rat that had performed well. Or as if I was some exotic and dangerous animal in a zoo. He was horrified at his own happiness that there had been something in the box. Shamed.
From Jubal, there was only tenderness for the sister he never had. Love and compassion and impotent rage. A need to protect. Through the pain of the headache that using my gift always brought, I centered my mind on Jubal. He became the point around which my mind circled, like a May Day pole twisted with ribbons of blood. I kept him near, held his hand and cried on his shoulder when technicians finally opened the other two boxes and discovered additional joints from the same finger.
When the police had all they could get from us and from the boxes, and when they had carried away the pieces of my brother in little envelopes they labeled as evidence, it was Jubal who carried me upstairs to his apartment and laid me on his own bed. It was Jubal who got me medicine and warm tea, and placed a cool wet rag over my eyes, and left me to rest. Jubal. My best friend.
“You’re sure this is a good idea?”
“It’s the only idea I have. That makes it a good idea,” I said.
“That makes it a bad one, too,” Noelle said.
“Pessimist. There’s a spot.” I pointed to an empty parking spot.
I checked our clothes and jewelry in the ambient street-lights. I was in bright aqua jeans and dark peach T-shirt and sweater under a bulky coat, while Noe was a vision of dark beauty in all black, head to toe. I sported last year’s green-and-peach aventurine jewelry; Noe was wearing megabeads of quantum quattro silica and bright glass turned with copper. We looked the prosperous jewelry makers.
“Yeah. We rock,” she said, agreeing with my silent assessment. “So, tell me about this kiss I heard so much about today.” Noe eased her front-wheel-drive Taurus into the narrow parking space on South Main Street. The snow tires made harsh grinding noises through the turn.
It took a moment before I remembered. Anything that happened before the delivery of the mail was a blur and took a moment to come clear. That was today? No. Last night? I couldn’t help my smile, though it felt small and strained. “It was a kiss. It was a really, really, really good kiss. Come on. We’ll be late.”
“Hmm,” was all she said on that subject as we slid from the car into the sleet and she beeped it locked. “Here we are. County Council versus Tree Huggers Inc. I wish Jubal had never let you see the newspaper. I’d have hidden it from you myself, if I’d thought you would want to come here. And I still say it’s a bad idea.”
Sleet made a shushing sound around us as we stood in front of a nondescript, blocky building from the early sixties. It was totally without charm or character unless ugly counted as an architectural design style. We entered the front door to find a steaming gathering, the heat so high that the coat-and-shoe ice from the assembled had melted into the air.
Glazed doughnuts and a coffeemaker, along with napkins and small foam cups, were on the long back table. The stink of scorched coffee was strong. The room was at full capacity, all facing the front. Had one or more of these people taken Davie? Tortured him? Had one of these people cut off his finger, chopped it up and sent it to me?
We stripped off our outerwear and draped the heavy coats over chair backs. No one looked to see who had entered and taken seats at the back. They were too busy booing a man at the front of the room. Colin Hornsburn.
The developer was of average height, wearing a crisp white shirt and sport coat, no tie and black slacks. He had the kind of haircut that made each strand look as if it had trained for the job and his skin had that shiny smooth look that simply screamed spa treatment. A city boy out of Asheville, by way of Atlanta.
“Gorgeous, single and charming,” Noe whispered in my ear. “He’s the developer who wants to put a housing development on the cusp of Mount Hoskins.”
I remembered an article I had read somewhere. It had described the project as “tasteful, mid-six-figure, high-end residences that would impact the ecosystem only minimally.” Davie had been incensed, raging about the people who wanted to destroy the environment. I remembered Davie complaining that the man was connected and rich. Rich enough to find both legal and government backing for the project. And Gail Speeler had been with him in the Red Bird Coffee Shoppe the day after Davie had been taken.
Hornsburn left the stage. As he took his seat, someone tossed a crumpled cup at his head. It missed, but the action brought a round of muffled laughter from the crowd. They didn’t like the man or his ideas. Hornsburn swiveled in his seat and looked daggers at the row behind him, which caused yet more laughter.
Yeah. This was the kind of place my brother would have gone. This was his kind of fight. Davie in his save-the-world mode would have fit in here like hand in glove. Having no interest in politics, I had never known that county council meetings involved so much passion, pathos and entertainment value. Of course, so many people in high mental states was bringing back my headache.
I tried to wall myself off mentally, but since opening the mail the wall was sluggish. I had been using my gift regularly and now found that I wasn’t having a lot of luck not using it. Wasn’t that a kicker? I rubbed my temple, hoping the pain would hold off enough for me to learn something about someone that would lead me to Davie.
Two other speakers stood to expound against the development, one a self-described green-logger, who harvested trees in narrow sections or rows to impact the environment and habitat as little as possible. The other was a scrawny, tough-as-leather woman with wispy gray hair. Not much taller than I, she stood at the front of the room, clad in jeans, boots and a leather coat, and speared the crowd with crystal-blue eyes.
“My family and I have lived in these mountains for over two hundred years,” she said in a whisky-and-smoke voice that instantly pacified the most vocal. “We’ve seen the change of the years. The decades. The centuries.” She smiled as she caught and held the attention of members of the crowd. The words were like poetry. They had a rhythm that rocked as a mother rocked her baby. Soothing.
The crowd settled as the woman spoke, growing still. Actually listening. “We’ve seen the trappers and the settlers come and go, killing or driving off the wildlife. Seen the miners come and go, leaving treacherous landscapes behind them. We’ve seen the loggers come and go, loggers who raped the land and left it to erode to the sea.”
I leaned again to Noe. “Who is she?” She wore a simple gold chain, diamonds in her ears, and an emerald ring with a stone big enough for a paperweight.
“Abby Marshall. She’s the biggest property owner around here. Pulls a lot of weight with the County Council,” Noe whispered, “though she doesn’t attend council meetings very often. Bit of a recluse.” She glanced at me, surprised at a memory. “Seems like one time when she came, Davie was talking to her. They acted pretty close.”
“We’ve seen the railroads and the road builders, the park builders and the farmers. And not one of them added a blessed thing to the land. They each took and took and took, and the land gave and gave and gave. It fought its way back from the loss of the chestnut trees—a man-made disaster—and the damage of the loggers, who left thousands of acres of bare earth exposed to the wind and the rain. From the strip miners. From the farmers who plowed up the land, let the to
psoil wash away, then stuffed the earth full of nitrates.”
Abby’s voice dropped to a near whisper. The crowd strained forward to catch the soft words. I felt my own skin drawing into slow prickles.
“Now the mountains are making battle against the golf course designers with their lab-created grass and artificial landscapes. With the developers, who want to stud the hills with homes and cut back the trees to make a great view for a rich family with no ties to the land, no ties to the earth.”
Her voice strengthened. “Sometime. Someday. We have to make a stand against development and for the environment, for the habitats of our wildlife. Someday! Before the mountains are lost to us forever, lost to our descendants and their descendants.” Her voice began to rise, slowly through the cadence of her words. “We have to find a way to live with the land again, as the ancient people did, as the Cherokee did, as a part of it but not stealing from it. We must remember how to give back to our land.”
The diminutive woman stood straight. “Colin Hornsburn and his moneyman, Orson Wylie, don’t want to give back. They want to scrap the plan that David St. Claire was putting together, a plan that would bring the people of this county into harmony with nature. And they want to do it for money.” She spit the word as if it tasted foul. “David St. Claire is missing,” she shouted to the room, her words resounding from the walls. “Taken by hoodlums. Kidnapped! The police can’t find him. No one can. And I say he was taken because he wanted only good for this land. Taken because too much money was at stake.”
She turned to Colin, pointed a finger at him, eyes like twin cutting torches, voice like a prophet of doom. “If this council gives permission for development to this man—gives it while David St. Claire is missing—gives it instead of tabling this motion until David St. Claire is found or someone else picks up the alternative plan and takes a leadership role, then I say our elected officials are all guilty of malfeasance. Of base mischief. Of misuse of the sacred office which they, which you—” she turned the pointed finger to the council seated to the side on the dais “—hold. Guilty. And you will pay a price.” She nodded her head once, dropped her arm and walked off the small stage. The place erupted with boisterous ovation and shouts of approval. A young woman stood and hugged Abby Marshall as if in delight. A man reached over her shoulder to shake Abby’s hand.
