by Ninie Hammon
“It was the perfect setup for the perfect crime. Everybody— including Mama—thought Mama did it. But she didn’t. Jericho killed Windy, Bobo. I know he did.”
“Well, if you say so, then I guess he did.” Bobo sounded convinced; I’d finally gotten through to her. But the strain of it must have knocked her connection to reality loose. As I watched, it came unplugged altogether.
“You ain’t said nothing to Jericho 'bout all this, have you?”
“No, Bobo, I haven’t had a conversation of any kind with Jericho in 25 years.” I began to pick up the potato peelings scattered all over the kitchen. “And I don’t intend to. I’ll let Dusty do that. Tomorrow morning when Dusty comes by to pick me up, I’m going to tell him that Jericho killed—murdered Windy.” I turned and pointed toward the storage closet. “In this kitchen, in that closet, a quarter of a century ago.”
“I don’t think Jericho’ll like you telling Dusty what he done.”
“I’m sure he won’t!” I dropped a handful of potato peelings into the trash can. “As far as I know, there’s no statute of limitations on murder. When Dusty finds Jericho, he’ll arrest him.”
“Well, he won’t have to look far. Jericho’s right here.”
I sighed. “What do you mean, he’s right here?”
“How many things can ‘he’s right here’ mean?” she snapped. “Jericho’s here. I talked to him just a little while ago.”
“Did he bring Edgar with him? And Maria and Butch?” I was trying to make light of it, but I was suddenly uneasy.
“No,” she said slowly. “You know, come to think of it, I ain’t seen Edgar in a long time.” She looked questioningly at me. “You don’t s’pose Jericho … you know, done something to Edgar.”
I smiled, relieved. “Well, you never know, Bobo. Did he say anything about Edgar when you saw him?”
I scraped the dollop of Crisco out of the iron skillet into the garbage can on top of the potato peels.
“Jericho never said nothing 'bout Edgar. He wasn’t here long. He was eatin’ an apple, and when he heard you coming, he left.”
“Well, if he didn’t say anything about Edgar, then …”
Eating an apple.
I looked at the apple with a bite out of it lying with the Crisco, bread, potato peels and flour in the garbage can. What Bobo said the first time she took out her dentures in front of me reverberated in my head.
“I ain’t complaining; my teeth fit real good. I ain’t bit into a apple in 30 years, but I do better than most.”
A Granny Smith apple. Jericho’s favorite kind.
Suddenly, all the lights in the house went out.
The kitchen was dark except for the spill of moonlight through the window over the sink and the Yankee candle flickering on the windowsill.
“Bobo, where’s the breaker box?” I croaked the question in a quaking voice.
Bobo stood and took two halting steps toward me. “Behind that picture of the Alamo in the hall outside the boys’ rooms.”
She suddenly leaned close and whispered, “Anne, you need to get out of here, Sugar. Right now. Run!”
Chapter 24
A freight train slammed into my chest and I couldn’t catch my breath.
Run. Get away. Hide!
Thoughts darted through my mind like terrified bats, not staying long enough for me to think them.
Outside. Neighbors. Go!
In the space between one second and the next, reality slowed, the way every movement in a nightmare is like swimming through cold molasses. I couldn’t turn quickly enough, or reach for the screen door handle fast enough. Through the timpani drum rattle of my heart in my chest, I heard a sound on the back staircase.
In slow motion, I reached out to the screen door and shoved it open as hard as I could, then turned and swam through syrup to the cellar door across from the storage closet where Windy died. The spring on the screen door stretched taut, then pulled back and slammed the door shut with a resounding bang a heartbeat after I eased the cellar door closed behind me. I took two steps down into the black pit, then I heard the screen door open and slam shut again.
Surprisingly, the cellar was not blind-man dark. Windows high on the cellar walls rested on the ground above. The one on the side of the house was mostly obstructed by shrubbery. But the two front windows peeked out from behind the flowers around the porch, and the streetlight shone through them like twin flashlight beams.
Footsteps. A man’s shoes. Just a glimpse.
Someone ran past the side window and down the stretch of grass that used to be a driveway toward the street. My knees went weak and I almost collapsed off the steps. Until that moment, the loyal opposition in my mind had proclaimed to those of us fighting frantically to keep me alive that Jericho was just another one of Bobo’s fantasies.
Doubt was gone now. Jericho was here. He knew what I’d remembered, and he was not about to let me tell Dusty. If he caught me, he would kill me.
A tiny burp of hysterical laughter, one little bleat, escaped my lips.
Kill me?
That was a phrase out of a slasher movie, out of a mystery novel heroine’s corny dialogue. That wasn’t real life. I could have made an impassioned plea before the High Court of Common Sense that all of this was absurd. Things like this didn’t happen to real people, to the Anne Mitchells of the world, to ordinary, nondescript human beings.
Except it was happening. The real, live Boogie Man was after me, and if I didn’t find a good place to hide, he’d do something very trite and melodramatic: he’d commit murder. He’d kill me just like he killed Windy.
On wobbly, trembling legs, I crept down the creaking wooden steps into the cool, musty cellar, the only spot I had not ventured into since I got home. And I certainly wouldn’t be here now if I had any other choice. I never liked the place when I was a child.
I remembered that—that I never liked the cellar. I knew that about myself. It felt so odd/normal not to have a vast empty void where my childhood was supposed to be.
The cellar was not a finished basement. It was a big hole in the ground with dirt walls and a dirt floor.
Like a grave.
Can’t think about that!
A single, large room, the cellar was roughly the same size and shape as the attic, but without the obstructions of chimneys. It was home to an oversized hot water heater for the bathrooms and laundry room, and the boiler and a tangle of pipes that provided water to the heat registers all over the house. Both had pale blue pilot lights that cast flickering shadows on the dirt floor.
Unlike the attic, the cellar had no bare bulb with a dangling pull chain. There was no overhead light. The cellar wasn’t jammed with all manner of junk, either. The only thing stored in the cellar were Mason jars full of the vegetables Bobo canned last summer. Bobo and Mama had always canned. Even before Bobo had a garden that occupied her whole backyard, she put away the fresh vegetables she bought at roadside vegetable and fruit stands, and made jam and jelly to eat through the winter.
We used to sit out on the front porch in the cool of the evening while the sun set on the back side of the house. Bobo in the swing, Mama in the rocker and me on the porch steps—shelling black-eyed peas, shucking corn or breaking up green beans. Another memory, part of the woven tapestry that had taken shape in my mind.
As soon as Mama and Bobo pulled the Mason jars of vegetables, jam, jelly or apple butter out of the pressure cooker, I was dispatched with them to the cellar, where they were stored on shelves all around the room.
That’s how I’d found the hollow in the wall. I’d been loading jars onto the shelves beneath the windows on the front of the house when one of the jars fell off the back side into the dirt. I got down on my hands and knees to retrieve it and saw an open space, a cave behind the shelf unit that was hidden from view unless you were at ground level and looked right at it. I never did figure out why somebody had dug out the space, what might once have fit there or what purpose it served. But it w
as old, cut into the dirt cellar wall by the previous owners when the house was constructed; it had been there before Granddaddy Cecil built the shelf units for canned goods in front of it.
I never told anybody about the cave, not even Windy. Sometimes, when the neighborhood kids played hide-and-seek in our house, I hid there. Nobody ever found me. Ever.
I got down on my hands and knees on the dirt floor in front of the bottom shelf that rested a couple of inches off the ground. I peered through the Mason jars on the shelf, and there it was, just like I remembered. Well, not just like I remembered. To an eight-year-old child, it had been a cave; to a grown-up, it was a little-kid-sized hole in a dirt wall.
But I was scared and skinny, and I was determined to jam myself into it somehow.
I moved the half dozen jars of green beans off the bottom shelf and squeezed between it and the next one. If I’d eaten enough of Bobo’s beets, I’d have had bulges that never would have made it through. As it was, I was able to curl my body into a tight ball that fit into the hole behind the shelf unit. I reached out, picked up the Mason jars I’d moved and replaced them on the shelf in front of me. Unless the thundering of my heart gave me away, Jericho wouldn’t find me here.
Dusty was supposed to pick me up at six o’clock so we could grab a cup of coffee with Amy at the steak house and then drive to Amarillo in time for my nine o’clock appointment.
I was stabbed by a sudden sharp pang of longing. The real world, the normal, everyday-life world, was so unutterably precious. You only realized that when it was gone.
I’d be safe as soon as Dusty got here. I just had to hold on and stay hidden until then. But how long would it take to search every nook and cranny of this whole house? You could do a lot of looking in seven hours!
What if Jericho has a flashlight? What if he gets down on his knees and shines it …?
I wanted to scream, to shriek away the terror in my belly. In an instant, panic snuggled up next to me, as close as the crumbling dirt above my head. I could smell its sweat, taste its metallic flavor in my chalky mouth. I gritted my teeth, squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to think about something else, to puzzle it through in my head, to figure out how it had come to this. How did Anne Mitchell, the Queen of Average, the timid creature who created Sir Filbert Wellington Frog III, Squire Squirrel and the Stately Oak Tree, end up hiding from a madman in a dirt hole in a cellar?
How did Jericho get into the house? Duh. He climbed up the trellis and crawled through the window in the attic that only opened from the outside. He was the one who’d repaired it years ago when the neighbor’s tree limb landed on our roof.
The attic door! Jericho used the WD-40 to fix the squeak. He had to; it made too much noise.
That thought made me instantly nauseated. I swallowed hard to not start heaving. If Jericho fixed the squeaky door, that meant he’d been in and out of the house for weeks!
But why?
Because he knew I was trying to remember! Joel told him. Joel asked me if I wanted to talk to his father, and I said no. But he told Jericho what I was doing anyway. I know he did. Sweet, simple Joel wanted so badly to help.
With the back staircase as his own private superhighway, Jericho had access to the whole house. And the way the hot water pipes/intercom system transferred sound between floors, he could have been privy to every conversation, could have heard every word spoken.
He was listening when I described to Bobo the things I was remembering, heard me get closer and closer to his secret. And to Dusty, that day he told me about Jericho’s sordid record and the inconsistencies in the accident report. We’d been sitting on the loveseat in the studio right beside the back stairs door! If Jericho was on the other side, he heard it all. He knew I was scheduled to see a shrink tomorrow who specialized in helping people remember their past.
I held my breath, halted the panting elephant sound so I could hear beyond the drone of tinnitus in my ears. I listened for the scrape of the cellar door or for sounds of any kind in the kitchen.
The kitchen. Bobo!
It suddenly hit me that I had left my grandmother upstairs to fend for herself against a killer! But Jericho wasn’t after Bobo; there was no reason for him to hurt her. She couldn’t tell the police he killed Windy. Nobody in the world could do that but me. And even if she tried, who’d believe her, an 84-year-old woman having an affair with a married man held together with 1,500 stitches? And who’d believe Bobo that Jericho was responsible if I suddenly went missing? Or turned up dead somewhere?
I bet Jericho put that gasoline can in the middle of Bobo’s bed! But he didn’t burn down the garage. Nope, can’t lay that on his doorstep. That was all my doing. He wasn’t the one who’d imagined it was full of spiders.
Spiders.
I thought of Julia, the day I remembered kneeling outside the closet door. I’d had to make up a reason for the frightened look on my face, so I told her I thought I’d seen a spider, that I hated spiders, and she’d said, “Then don’t go down in the cellar; it’s full of spiders!”
The cellar’s full of spiders! Of course it is!
Dusty cobwebs always draped like tattered lace curtains between beams and from one shelf to the next. Webs you couldn’t see in the dark. That’s why I’d never shared the secret of my hiding place with Windy. She’d been terrified of spiders ever since the day I grabbed the tarantula off her face. I didn’t want her to come down here because the cellar was crawling with spiders.
Crawling with spiders! Panic welled up in me the way a wave of nausea grips your belly seconds before you throw up. Overwhelming. Unstoppable.
Can’t do it! Can’t stay here! Spiders crawling on me …
In a frenzy of squirming that knocked loose a shower of dirt, I struggled to get out of the hole in the wall. I shoved the Mason jars of green beans off the bottom shelf onto the floor and scrambled out behind them.
I was covered head to toe with hunks of dirt—or spiders! I jumped to my feet and feverishly dusted off my arms and legs.
Get them off me! Get them off me!
I felt something on my head. A clod of dirt. No, a spider! It really was! A spider was crawling across the top of my head!
I slapped at it and smashed it into my hair.
And suddenly, I had no say, no control over my legs, no authority over my body at all. I might as well have been a passenger in a bus when the driver decides to change directions. I writhed in a flailing, gyrating dance to shake off the spiders—real and imagined—that crawled on me. Then I leapt to the cellar steps, took them two at a time. From a great distance, I heard myself whimper, the squeaky moan that’s not really crying, that’s too scared to cry, the hitching sound of imminent hysteria. I burst out the cellar door in a final desperate lunge.
And fell into Jericho’s arms.
He was startled, obviously didn’t expect to see me pop out of the cellar like a jack-in-the box. My momentum knocked him off balance so he couldn’t get a grip on me; I lost my footing and slid down out of his arms into a heap on the floor at his feet.
“Well, hello, Annie.” His voice was the most horrible sound I’d ever heard. “I’ve been looking for you.”
I screamed then, gave voice to all the pent-up fear, wailing a shrill shriek of surprise and shock and terror.
“I always was glad this old house ate up sound. The neighbors never did hear your Mama and me yelling at each other. They ain’t going to hear you making all that racket neither.”
I scuttled away from him on the floor like a sand crab moving sideways, scooted as far as I could go. Then I huddled tight up against the cabinet under the sink, trembling, and stared up at him.
His features were surprisingly clear in the spill of moonlight from outside and the flickering candle in the window.
What was far more surprising was how profoundly he’d changed. Jericho was frozen in my mind as a dashingly handsome man in his mid-30’s, with a square jaw, blue eyes the same color as Joel’s, and a lock of fire-tru
ck-red hair in a widow’s peak on his forehead. That’s how he’d looked the last time I saw him.
The person standing above me in the flickering candlelight was the ruin of a man.
It was almost like his features had melted, run; there were no lines or planes anymore. The square jaw had disappeared into jowls and a turkey-neck sag beneath his chin. His cheeks and eyes were so puffy that they looked swollen; his freckled skin was wrinkled and blotched. He had hardly any hair at all, just a rim of fuzzy rust around his head, like a soap ring in a bathtub. And his bent, flattened nose had obviously come into contact with somebody’s fist. He was at least 75 pounds heavier than he used to be. A pendulous beer belly hung out over the belt buckle on his jeans and pulled his black T-shirt tight around it.
What hadn’t changed was the cornflower blue of his eyes— the color anyway. But now they looked like dead fish eyes--pale, lifeless marbles.
The years had used up Jericho Johnson, sucked out his vitality and virility and left behind nothing but meanness. The man looking down at me was fully as dangerous as the rattlesnakes skinned to make his boots.
No, he was more than dangerous. He was evil. But he always had been evil; it just wasn’t the kind of wickedness a little girl could see.
“The Little Princess did grow up to be a looker after all.” He leered at me. “I always thought you might. You’re even prettier than your mother was when I first met her, before she crawled into a bottle. You still got all that hair, too. I used to watch Bobo braid it, and I always wanted to run my hands through it, feel how—”
In a sudden, blinding flash, fury burned away every particle of fear.
“You repulsive, pathetic, fat pig!” I spit the words at him like the taste of them in my mouth made me sick. I felt the same rage I’d felt when I saw the tarantula crawl on Windy; Jericho Johnson was a tarantula spider in a human being suit. “Touch me and you’ll draw back a stump!”
His face hardened; menace oozed from his voice.
“Well, now that’s not going to be the way of it, Annie girl, and that’s a fact.” He shook his head in mock perplexity. “Why couldn’t you just let it alone, huh? Why couldn’t you just let it rest?”
