The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

by Sharyn McCrumb

  He stopped the car and turned to face her. "Are you ready?" No one was within half a mile of the car, but still he whispered. His breath hung in the air between them, as if his soul had leaked out of his body.

  Maggie looked down at her hands. "I could wait here, Mark."

  "No. We don't have much time. You have to help me dig."

  He hauled himself out of the car, slamming the door behind him. The shovels and hand tools were in the trunk. Maggie huddled in the passenger seat until he tapped on her window with the handle of the shovel, and motioned for her to come out. She crept from the car, cinching her coat more tightly about her, and fol-248

  lowed him down the hill toward the family graves. The wind whipped at her legs and made her face tingle with numbness.

  Mark walked ahead, with both shovels slung over his shoulder and his overcoat pockets bulging with heavy hand tools. He was treading on the bronze markers in his path as if he were unaware of their significance. He was alone. Regally alone. Oblivious to the dead beneath his feet, or to the stumbling footfalls of his little sister, treading behind him.

  Maggie Underhill was humming an old hymn, one that she used to sing in choir. "I am weak, but thou art strong; Jesus keep me from all wrong ..." That song reminded her of Josh. He was always strong. When Daddy would yell at them or get out his belt, Maggie would always cry, and Mark would try to slip out of the room. Only Josh would stand his ground, waiting silently for the inevitable beating, not running and not crying. He would endure the beating with a faraway look on his face, showing no emotion at all, which only made the major angrier. It was as if Josh went somewhere else when he was being hurt, so that the welts were inflicted on an empty body. Maggie could never manage his detachment. She would always end up screaming, even though she knew her father savored her pain. Sometimes Josh tried to protect her. Even if he wasn't the one in trouble, he'd stay and say the infraction was his fault, hoping to get Maggie a reprieve. Like as not, it would get him a harder beating, and Maggie would get one anyway. They had long since 249

  learned not to appeal to their mother when the major threatened them with punishment. She would shake her head and walk away. Sometimes she would even remind her husband of chores not done or infractions that occurred in his absence. Janet Underhill was no maternal refuge.

  Paul Underhill had worn a wooden paddle as thin as a nail file disciplining his children. He made a ritual out of it. "Go and get Sergeant Rod," he would tell the offending child. He kept the homemade paddle on the fireplace mantel. Its handle was a foot long, and wrapped in black electrical tape to afford a better grip to the major when he hit his children with it. Its blade was painted red, but the paint had worn away over the years. It still hung in its accustomed place in the living room. Maggie wanted to throw it away, but she could not bring herself to touch it.

  Maggie shivered in the darkness watching the shadowy form of her brother, trying to break frozen ground with his shovel. She wished Josh were here now. Then she would be all right. She didn't know whether Josh would go along with Mark or not—that was the trouble—but whatever he decided would be right, and then she'd know. She thought he might call her tonight before they left, but the telephone was silent. She began to hum louder, as if the sound could summon him here.

  "Be quiet, Maggie!" Mark hissed at her in the darkness.

  "Why?" she said in her normal tone of voice. 250

  "There's nobody here, and according to you, we're just reclaiming our property, aren't we?"

  He shrugged. "I guess. It distracts me. I need to concentrate." He looked out at the white shapes of distant stones beyond the trees. "I have a flashlight in my jacket pocket, but I don't want to use it if we can help it."

  Maggie shuddered as a gust of wind caught her. "It's too cold."

  "You'll be warm enough when you start digging," Mark whispered. "I've loosened the dirt now. We have to hurry. At least we won't be visible from the road."

  She knelt in the frosted grass and picked up the other shovel. She pushed its blade into the earth with her foot, but the ground was hard, yielding only a few clods of dirt to her digging. Mark was stronger. He had managed to carve out a small hole below the bronze marker, and he was busy enlarging it, piling the soil in a mound behind him.

  They worked in silence, punctuated by the rhythmic chunk and scrabble of the shovels. Maggie tried to keep thinking about Josh—not his body, lying under another of the bronze markers, but of the voice that spoke to her still. She wondered where he was and wished she were there, too.

  The thud of shovel point against a flat surface startled her out of her reverie. Mark jumped down into the hole, which was only knee-deep, and began to probe the soil with his gloved fingers.

  "Get the light," said Mark. 251

  So dark and so cold. Mark and his shovel made a dark shape in the shallow excavation. She could not see what lay at the bottom, but the hole seemed no more than three feet long. Then she remembered that the oak casket lid was cut in two sections, so that the mortuary could open only the top portion for viewing at the funeral. A half perfection couch, the funeral director called it. Mark would only need to uncover the upper half of the casket. The muscles of her face were taut with cold. Maggie picked up the flashlight, switched it on, and stretched it out to her brother.

  "No. You hold it. At least until I need you to help me. Shine it down at my feet."

  "The hole isn't deep," she said, staring into the small circle of light below her. "I thought they were put in deeper than that."

  "Just as well," said Mark. "I still have more to dig, though. I wonder which side the catch is on."

  Maggie stood with her back to the wind, teetering on the edge of the opening grave, as he opened a narrow trench along one side of the casket. The light wobbled in her hands as she looked out across the empty field and up at the stars above the shadows of mountains. The stars over Hamelin shone as clear as ice pellets. She had never seen so many. No haze of city lights diluted their brilliance.

  Mark tossed the shovel up on the bank, and squatted on top of the casket, feeling along the newly excavated side for the brass latch. "Found it!"

  One by one, Maggie began to count the stars. 252

  *

  Joe LeDonne had stayed an extra hour on patrol because it was Friday night, prime time for wrecks on back country roads. The Hamelin High basketball team had played an away game in Erwin, and LeDonne was afraid that hot-rodding teenagers would turn the two-lane blacktop into a drag strip on the way home. Tonight, though, they had been lucky: The switchback curves on the old Erwin road had claimed no young sacrifices, and now, after hours of cold riding past dark houses and frosted fields, LeDonne could call it quits.

  He went back to the courthouse to pick up his old Volkswagen, and then headed for the one place in town that was open past midnight, the Mockingbird Inn. Most of the regulars would still be nursing beers, trying to drag out Friday night as long as it would go, but LeDonne took no interest in that. He wanted black coffee and a hamburger with tomato and mayonnaise before he went home to his own dark house. He'd see Martha on Saturday night, when Godwin pulled the night patrol.

  As he walked into the noisy roadhouse, a sudden hush fell over a room filled with people who had been laughing and dancing a moment before. The sight of LeDonne's brown uniform had dampened spirits. He gave them a perfunctory nod to indicate that he wasn't there on business, and slid into an empty booth, feeling like the Angel of Death. From force of habit, though, he scanned the room. Some of the county hell-253

  raisers were there, but they didn't look drunk enough to cause trouble. He saw mostly truckers on coffee break and Wake County's singles, shopping around between divorces. At the bar, though, sat Vernon Woolwine, dressed for an evening out in a black cape lined in red satin, worn over a threadbare dark suit. His black hair, slicked back across the crown of his head, gleamed like—and perhaps was—shoe polish. He was alone. LeDonne was thinking of going up and offering him a ride home when
someone slid into the booth across from him, and said, "Long time no see."

  It was Justin Warren, beer in hand, wearing a leather bomber jacket and a Stetson. None of his weekend warriors had accompanied him to the Mockingbird Inn. With an ironic grin, he lifted his mug in a toast to the scowling deputy.

  "Long time no see," LeDonne agreed. "Lucky you. When I can get a warrant, I'll drop in on your little imitation boot camp."

  Justin Warren shook his head. "I don't know why you want to take that attitude, Deputy. I'm a law-abiding citizen who pays property taxes."

  "I don't think we need somebody importing trigger-happy toy soldiers into the county. Sooner or later, one of them will get shot, or you'll get careless with the drugs or the illegal weapons, and we'll be there waiting to shut you down." LeDonne looked around for the waitress. Where the hell was his coffee?

  "Things must be pretty slow in Dogpatch if you have to worry so much about one law-abiding stranger. What do you do for fun? 254

  Round up stray dogs?" Warren laughed. "You poor guys can't even get a good murder case to chew on. The last one you had was the Underhill family, wasn't it? I read about them. And that crime solved itself before you got there."

  LeDonne looked up quickly. "Maybe. Did you know the Underhills?"

  "I knew the major. Met him in here about this time of night, once. He seemed all right. Too bad his kid went berserk. I figured it for drugs."

  LeDonne searched the man's face for a sign of strain. "Did you get along with Paul Underbill? Like him?"

  "Didn't care one way or the other." Justin Warren smiled. "You really are afraid of me, aren't you?" he said. "You're hoping you can arrest me for something so that I won't haunt you anymore."

  "Why should you haunt me?"

  "Because you miss your old life. Your old buddies. Combat is a hard-on like nothing else. You still dream about it. You close your eyes and you're back in the jungle, and it's so real you can smell it. You're a cop because you're still chasing that rush. You want to come out to the camp in the night, and lose yourself in the woods with us. We can take you back to when you were alive, LeDonne. Join the hunt, why don't you? Where's the harm?"

  Where was the harm? LeDonne was picturing himself in camos, crawling through the wet woods, reactivating senses he hadn't needed for twenty years: the smell of fear, the electric feel of someone hidden close by. Maybe he could go 255

  up one night and join in; it would be a good way to check the place out and see if they were up to anything. Make sure there were no drugs around. He could feel his muscles tighten at the thought of the hunt, and he almost smiled.

  LeDonne's coffee arrived, but when he looked up to thank Crystal, he saw that she was not the one who brought it. Instead, LeDonne found himself staring into the solemn, pudgy face of a satanic Vernon Woolwine. In his present incarnation, Vernon had reddened his mouth to a gash, and ringed his mournful eyes with black eyeliner, in his best imitation of Bela Lugosi. The hillbilly vampire pointed to the coffee on the scarred pine table and ruffled his cloak with a flourish by way of greeting. "Going my way?"

  "Just about," said the deputy, getting to his feet. He took a long swallow of coffee. "I reckon I can run you home, Vernon. I'm about through here." Suddenly, he wanted to go home. Not to his empty house. He wondered if Martha would still be awake.

  In her iron bedstead with the hollow pipes at the head and foot of it, Nora Bonesteel was dreaming, her eyelids flickering in the darkness. Her hands were curled into fists as she struggled with the senses flooding her brain, but it was a blind dream. She saw nothing. She felt. The mattress beneath her turned hard as a board, and she could not turn over. The space seemed hardly larger than her own body. She felt the itch of mold growing on her cheek and in the hollow of her throat, but she could not 256

  raise her hand to scratch away the patches of green. She knew, without seeing them, that the patches of mold were green. The color of wet and decay. The bed felt wet with a heavy cold fluid that was not water, but she could not sit up. When she tried to cry out for release, she found that her lips would not open. Copper threads tied her lips together, blocking her tongue. She could feel the wires attached to triangular points stuck into her inner lips, but there was no sensation of pain, only the bitter taste of copper against her shriveled tongue. Beyond that there was only immobility, and cold.

  When she felt the cold blade of the hatchet cut through the skin of her neck, Nora Bonesteel sat bolt upright, tears streaming down her face, groping for the bedside lamp. She felt her face and her neck, and stretched her lips to reacquaint herself with the form of the sleeping woman that she was. She could see and move; the sensation of confinement faded as she returned to full wakefulness.

  With shaking fingers she switched on every light in her house and then lit two candles on the parlor mantelpiece. She fiddled with the radio dial, usually set for classical music, until she found an all-night bluegrass station blasting out lively, familiar country songs, and there she sat till sunup in her blue Queen Anne chair, enveloped in noise and light to wall out the roaring darkness.

  CHAPTER 12

  The . . . house

  Went up in a roar of flame,

  As I danced in the yard with waving arms,

  While he wept like a freezing steer.

  - EDGAR LEE MASTERS,

  Spoon River Anthology

  They were on the sidewalk in Johnson City. Maggie Underhill kept trying to dodge the gusts of wind, pulling her short cloth coat tighter around her, but Mark seemed oblivious to the cold. He was wearing his blue blazer and a burgundy tie emblazoned with shields. He might have passed for a law student except that his hair was too long, and there was a glazed quality to his stare. He was clutching a white pillowcase wrapped around something angular. It jutted out through the folds of cloth, giving off fumes like rotten eggs mixed in kerosene. Mark didn't seem to notice the smell. He held the bundle to his chest as if it were a kitten.

  "Let me do the talking," he murmured to his sister. "You just stand there and look sincere. Can you handle that?"

  Maggie looked away. That's what Josh had been telling her, too. He had called that night when they got back from Oakdale, half-frozen and sick with the smell of formalin. After Mark parked the car under the oak tree, he had gone to the woodshed to hide the object of their quest. Maggie let herself in by the back door, 261

  and put the kettle on to make tea. She was warming her hands over the heat of the stove burner when the kitchen telephone rang. With a smile of relief, Maggie walked over and picked it up.

  "It's going to be all right," she heard Josh say in his gentlest voice. "You just hold on, Maggie. I'm here. I'm with you."

  "Did you see what we did?" Maggie asked. "Are you mad at us?"

  She thought she heard him sigh, which struck her as odd, since ghosts didn't draw breath. "No, Maggie. I'm not mad at you. I'm just sorry it had to be this way. I want you to hold on, Maggie. Can you do that? Just keep on keeping on until spring, and then everything will be all right."

  A new thought made her shudder. "Are you with Daddy, Josh? Is he mad at us?"

  "He's not here. I have to go now. Just remember I care about you. And I'm with you. No matter how bad it gets."

  "I couldn't run away. And I can't tell on Mark. We never told on each other. I wouldn't even get down the paddle for anyone else's whipping."

  "I know, Maggie. Just hold on."

  "Can I call you?"

  "You don't have to."

  After that she'd made herself some tea, and

  took a long, hot shower. When she came out,

  she heard Mark in the front room, pacing and

  talking loudly, as if he were arguing with some-

  one, but she didn't go down to see. She was suddenly very sleepy.

  That had been two weeks before. Now it was Valentine's Day. Maggie had passed the days watching television, a pastel blur of game shows, looking out the window, and waiting for Josh to call again, but he never did. Sh
e never went out into the woodshed to see by daylight their terrible acquisition. Nor did she speak of it to Mark. The days went by, and she thought perhaps he had forgotten about it, now that the urgency of retrieving it was past. At first she had been afraid that their vandalism would be discovered by a cemetery groundskeeper, but apparently his vigilance in winter was not great. They had reburied the coffin, and covered the earth with leaves. No one seemed to have noticed the disturbance. As each day passed, Maggie spent less time looking out the window at the gravel drive and the low-water bridge that led up to the highway. She stopped going cold at every loud noise. Gradually, television became more real to her than life, and she snuggled down in its bland warmth, safe again, as Josh had promised.

  Mark let two weeks pass before he mentioned the money again. He came downstairs at eleven, hours earlier than his usual time of awakening, and announced that they were going to Johnson City after lunch. He was clean-shaven, and his hair was combed. Dress up, he'd told her. This was business. Without a word of protest, Maggie put on her navy blue wool and some makeup 263

  and followed her brother to the car without asking the purpose of the journey.

  They drove the two-lane mountain road to Johnson City in silence. The pillowcase on the backseat reeked in the closed car until Maggie was ready to gag. She opened her window a crack, but the cold air was too bitter against her face. She hoped they'd be leaving the thing in Johnson City; she didn't want to know what it was. Mark pulled into a parking space on a quiet side street, and headed for a glass-fronted store, the pillowcase under his arm. Maggie fumbled in her purse for coins for the parking meter, but found that she hadn't any money. In the end, she trailed after her brother, wondering what "business" had brought them to town.