Again, he chunked his shovel into the dirt, let the handle stick up. He came to the edge of the grave, rested his elbows over the lip. “Thing is, now that Hedrick was outta the way, I had Evelyn all to myself. But I surely didn’t want her that way, no sir. The thought of touching that bag of crazy turned my gut. I had to make her right again. So…one night when I came a’calling, Thomas was in the bath. Took a lotta baths, that boy. As usual, Evelyn wasn’t much company, not much good for anything. Not giving any thought to it, I just walked right on up the stairs. I snuck up behind Thomas, my mind all cloudy and what not, put my hands on my son’s shoulders, gave him a couple of loving pats. He didn’t respond. And I just pushed him under. Boy didn’t struggle a bit. After he was gone, I carried him down, plain as day—Evelyn didn’t notice a thing—put him in the bed of my truck, tossed a tarp over him, waited a couple hours. Then put him to rest next to Hedrick.”
“You’re a monster.” Just like Dad had told me, the human monsters were the really bad ones.
“Aw, you’re gonna hurt my feelings. So, Evelyn she finally notices her boy missing. I tell her he ran away. Well, that sorta backfired on me in a big way. She got worse, made up some cockamamie story a monster stole Thomas away. Jumping Jesus, I was beside myself. I figured the only thing that’d set Evelyn back to good was another son. So I did some poking around in other towns, found a boy roughly the same age as Thomas in Durham, grabbed him up and handed him to Evelyn.”
“And…she just accepted him?”
“It took a lotta fancy footwork, but she was so far gone, it hardly mattered. I just told her it was her new son. I told her she had to keep him indoors, keep him quiet, lessen the monster might come for him, too. For a while, she was happy with her new doll. But that boy was more trouble than Thomas. Couple times he broke free from the cellar, took off running through the woods. Both times I was lucky enough to catch him. Third time, I’d had enough. Put him underwater over at Myrtle Creek and whisked him away to join his ‘brother.’ When I told Evelyn the monster took Richard, too, she just accepted it and crawled deeper into her hole.”
“What about poor Hettie?”
“What about that ol’ meddlesome bitch? Hell, she knew I was Thomas’s daddy. I ‘spected she might’ve known more. And since you decided to stir the pot again, I had to put things right.” He jabbed a finger directly between my eyes. “Don’t you judge me, goddammit! Don’t you dare! Ol’ Hettie’s death hangs on your head, not mine!”
Something moved behind Grigsby. A shadow detached from the Judge’s tree. Several shadows. They shambled, walked stiffly toward us. Two short figures flanked a taller one in the middle, their hands linked together. I had no doubt who they were: Thomas, Richard, and Hedrick.
I was wrong.
Not about Thomas and Richard. As they came closer, moonlight alit on the boys’ wan faces. They released the hands of the adult, faded back into darkness.
But the adult figure was tall, very tall, so tall his upper body remained hidden in shadow, supernaturally tall. Not Hedrick, not by a long shot.
A white blob bounced about where the man’s face should be. As he ambled closer, his gaunt head took shape, defined by harsh and angular lines. Under any other circumstance, I’d have been wetting my britches. Not tonight, not now.
“You’re a horrible, awful person, Sheriff. It’d be damned easy to judge you. But tonight, I’ll leave the judging to someone with a bit more experience.”
“What the hell’re you on about? You’re as nutty as your mother. You just—”
Judge Wilbur’s noose quickly tied off Grigsby’s foul words. Stiff as a marionette, the judge wrenched back a near bone arm. The rope tightened. Grigsby’s eyes snapped wide. His face turned purple. Fat cheeks puffed out, ready to explode.
Hunched over, the Judge peered into the grave and grinned at his handiwork. His white hair hung down to his shoulders. A bald patch of bone crowned the top of his head. A hawkish nose dipped over his thin-lipped grin. His judge’s robes hung in raven-black tatters. A gust of wind beat the remains of his ceremonial garb like a kite.
Grigsby’s fingers dug at the rope tightening into the fat of his neck. His mouth gaped, his tongue lolled out. The judge straightened and tugged Grigsby off his feet. Grigsby’s fat legs thrashed at the dirt walls of the grave, his hands still tugging at the rope. With each jerky movement, the judge’s bones snapped and popped. One last mighty exertion and the Judge wrenched Grigsby completely out of the grave to look him in the eye. The Judge’s joints creaked, but the rope creaked louder.
Slowly, the Judge lifted his head. His chin, his nose, his overhanging brow pointed at me. Assigning me as his juror. The grin grew into a wide, nightmarish smile. His thin lips never parted, but teeth shone through the spotty flesh. His head tipped. A bushy white eyebrow lifted, questioning.
He waited for my answer.
I closed my eyes. Dropped my chin to my chest. Whispered, “Okay.”
Grigsby managed to set free a scream. A shiver lodged in my back. I didn’t dare look. I surely didn’t want to.
The sounds were bad enough.
Grigsby’s scream cut short, nothing more than a hiccup. With whispery sounds, his fat carcass sledded away through the grass. Judge Wilbur’s bones kept scraping, groaning.
Wood split, a giant tree ripped asunder. Roots tore up with great cleaving sounds. The ground shuddered. Then, as if the earth swallowed the Judge and Grigsby up—and I fairly think that’s exactly what happened—the ground below me shifted, actually shifted. A great breath of heat blew over my back. Beneath the dirt, the core of the world grumbled. Then settled.
Beautiful, sane silence.
I opened my eyes. Other than Grigsby’s car and the half-dug grave, it’s as if the Sheriff had never existed. He certainly didn’t now.
A car rushed up, headlights on bright. Near full-on hysterical, I laughed as my cavalry riding in on a hearse—a tad late—raced up the meadow.
The hearse’s tires spat up grass. Inches from Grigsby’s car, Dad shuddered to a stop. James hopped out first, followed by Dad. They ran toward me, yelling their fool heads off.
“I’m over here,” I called. As my hands were indisposed, I waggled my shoulders to no great note.
Wonderfully worried, they made a bit to-do over me. Dad didn’t even bat an eye when James produced a switchblade to cut my bonds.
“Dibs? Are you okay? Did Grigsby do anything to—” Dad hushed when I threw my arms around him.
I let him go, turned to face James. Consequences didn’t matter, embarrassment seemed impossible. I leaned forward and pressed my lips onto James’. For better traction, my hands slapped aside his cheeks. He fell from his squat onto his back. Unbelievably, he pushed me away.
“Um, Dibs?” Blatant as a train crash, he kept jutting his chin toward Dad.
Given the circumstances, Dad reacted the best he could. He studied the night sky, doing his dangdest to look patient, cleared his throat which apparently needed a lot of clearing. I’m sure he died a bit inside, and while we were at the appropriate venue, I wanted him around for some time yet.
Laughing like a loon, I stood, and pulled both of my men into an awkward—for them, at least—hug.
Another voice nearly sent me screaming into the surrounding woods. “Dibby! I’ve been worried sick!” Fashionably late, Suzette scooted out of the hearse’s back-seat.
“You got a funny way showing it, Suzette,” I snapped. “You just took off, leaving us to be murdered!”
“What?” Dad apparently hadn’t been brought up to speed yet.
Suzette started crying as if she’d been the one who’d been put through the wringer. “I tried to find your dad…I went into your house…I got lost and…it was so big and so horrible and…I was so scared…and finally your dad found me…and…”
She was too pathetic to just leave standing there. “C’mon over, Suzette. I reckon there’s enough room in this hug for you, too. Just don’t give me any of your coot
ies.”
* * *
There were a mighty lot of belated funerals in Hangwell and Peculiar County the following week and Dad’s business bloomed. I attended ‘em all. Like it or not, funeral gatherings pretty much became my regular social outings. At least I had a date to escort me. James cleaned up pretty nicely in his single Sears ordered suit. Even Dad seemed a bit astonished by James’ Cinderella do-over, but, of course, he’d never let James know that.
The funeral I’d been most yearning to attend had been Hettie’s, of course, but the Sooters kept their mystery memorial to themselves. Turned out I owed the Sooters a debt, though. Thanks to their stone-faced gargoyle spy, Yvette had phoned Dad, told him to hightail it fast to the Hangwell Cemetery. Once an adult had verified James’ wild stories, Dad finally jumped into action. Some things never change. I didn’t hold it against Dad, though. At least he was trying, especially with the world changing radically every day.
Around town, a lot of speculation passed lips regarding what’d happened to Sheriff Grigsby. Thanks to surviving Devin Meyers—suffering a wound that’d landed him in critical care in Durham General Hospital for a spell—the truth had won out, the Sheriff implicated on all counts of murder. Turned out ol’ Devin didn’t know a thing about any of his sister’s murderous past. That was his story, at least. Me, I don’t rightly see how anyone could turn such a blind eye toward loved ones’ doings, particularly while sharing a dwelling.
Still, there was the question of what had happened to good ol’ Sheriff Grigsby. The official line, one I started myself, was that upon seeing Dad’s car approach, our wondrous Sheriff panicked and dashed off into the woods, never to be seen again.
But the gossip spread like cold germs.
“He’s down in Mexico!”
“He was a secret Russian spy!”
“Martians took him!”
“He ran off to join his secret lover, Dibby’s mom, and they’re having cocktails and sex on a beach somewhere.”
Boot himself had told me of these wild flights of fancy, heard ‘em over the phone. The first three I found hoot-worthy. Not so much the third. I didn’t bother sharing it with Dad either.
The only person I ever told about what really happened to the Sheriff was James. I knew Dad wouldn’t buy into it. And if he did, I knew him well enough to know that it’d just shake up his world of logic and facts and science. I let Dad hide behind his scientific mumbo-jumbo, a safer place for him.
But the Judge’s Hanging Tree held the truth, if anyone dared investigate. A new knot had grown since the Sheriff’s disappearance. One strangely resembling Grigsby’s tormented face, screaming away in eternal silence.
Not many folks gave the Sheriff a second thought after that, such is the way of Peculiar County.
After Evelyn’s funeral and Hedrick and Thomas Saunders’ twin memorial, I attended my last one, the one in Durham.
Boot Gundersen had again donned his war uniform, empty sleeve fastened to his chest. For a man his age, he stood at rigidly straight posture. Until they began to lower the remains of his grandson, Richard Holmberg, into the ground. Then he folded, crying, looking much more the senior citizen he was.
Boot did something then that surprised me. I reckon it restored my faith in humanity, dislodged me out of my jaded, seen-it-all, funk of fifteen. He turned toward me, smiled. Wagged his hand for me to join him. I looked at James who hadn’t a clue either. I released my boyfriend’s hand and quietly sidled up next to Boot.
By his side, he held out his hand. Fingers wagged and waited. I slipped my hand into his. He leaned over, whispered, “Everything you did for my Grandson, you got a right to be right up here with us, Miss Dibby. You’re kin now.”
He pulled his hand away, draped it around my shoulders. Pulled me in close. Although he smelled of tobacco, sweat, and something indefinably awful, I didn’t mind one whit.
The End
More Stuart R. West Novels Published by Books We Love:
Bad Day in a Banana Hammock (Book One of the Zach & Zora Mysteries)
Murder by Massage (Book Two of the Zach & Zora Mysteries)
Ghosts of Gannaway
Secret Society (Book One of Killers Incorporated)
Strike (Book Two of Killers Incorporated)
Killer King (Book Three of Killers Incorporated)
Stuart R. West is a lifelong resident of Kansas, which he considers both a curse and a blessing. It's a curse because...well, it's Kansas. But it's great because…well, it’s Kansas. Lots of cool, strange and creepy things happen in the Midwest, and Stuart takes advantage of them in his work. Call it “Kansas Noir.” Stuart writes thrillers and mysteries usually tinged with humor, both for adult and young adult audiences.
Stuart spent 25 years in the corporate sector and now writes full time. He’s married to a professor of pharmacy (who greatly appreciates the fact he cooks dinner for her every night) and has a 25 year old daughter who’s dabbling in the nefarious world of banking.
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