by Ninie Hammon
“What other stuff?” Carter asked.
“The cabinet’s open in the kitchen, and I think a mason jar’s missing.”
“For water,” Grayson said.
“Cheese, all that was left of the bread, a couple of slices, some apples—maybe there was an orange,” Piper said. “Why would she do a thing like this?”
“Because we wouldn’t listen last night,” Carter said.
“About that nightmare she had?” Marian asked.
“That’s right!” Piper said. “She wanted us all to run away—and when we wouldn’t, she did!
“Why?” Marian began.
“She said some monster was after us, just kid stuff. Imagination,” Grayson said. “She said we had to ‘get up high.’”
“The top of the mountain, maybe?” Marian said.
“Maybe,” Grayson said. He put his hands on his mother’s shoulders. “You need to lie back, now, Ma. We’ll find them.” He eased her down on the pile of pillows that held her frail body in something like a sitting position in the bed. He could see in her eyes she wanted to protest, but she didn’t have the strength.
“We need to get dressed,” he said to Piper and Carter, “and go outside and look around the yard, see if we can find any indication which way they went.”
“It’s up,” Marian said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I b’lieve that. Up the side of the mountain.”
Dressed only in the underwear and T-shirt he slept in, Grayson picked up the boots with red clay on the bottom and his pants that had been left on the kitchen table, carried them out to the storage shed beside the back porch and got out his fatigue shirt. As he was lacing up his boots, Piper and Carter came out the back door, and he gestured with his chin to the open gate in the back fence.
“I was playing out here with Sadie yesterday,” he said, “and I’m sure I closed it.”
“She wouldn’t have gone out the back gate if she was going down the road to town,” Carter said.
“But which way?” Piper was near tears. She hurried ahead of them to the fence and frantically scanned the mountainside. “Shouldn’t we tell somebody, go get Sheriff Cliff?” There was only a moment of awkward silence at the mention of the sheriff. Finding the missing children was what mattered now; there’d be time for the other later. “We can’t search all these woods. We need help!” She glanced up at the sky. Clouds were moving in. “What if it starts to rain?
“We are not going to search anywhere,” Grayson said gently. “You’re going to go sit with Ma while Carter and I go find the girls.”
She started to protest, but for once the brothers displayed a solidly united front.
“How about this,” Carter said. “Gray and I’ll spread out, search until”—he looked at his watch—“we meet at Hickman’s Thumb at noon. If we haven’t found them by then, we’ll come back and go for help.” He looked to Grayson for approval; Grayson nodded.
Grayson took Piper by the shoulders. “We’ll find them, okay? It’ll be all right.” She looked at him, her eyes so full of unshed tears he knew a single blink would send them streaming down her face.
“Okay, till noon,” she said.
“Ma’s worried sick,” Carter said. “She—”
“I know. I’ll…just find them!”
She turned and hurried back into the house.
Grayson faced Carter. The glug-glug sound their “united front” made as it drained out of their relationship was almost audible.
“My money’s on south,” Grayson said emotionlessly. “North toward the church is steep and beyond it’s the ridge and Turtle Shell Rock. You can see from here that’s unclimbable. And straight up the mountain from here is steep, too. I don’t think two little girls could get up that incline on this side of the dam. If the kid’s bent on up, she’ll go south and try to angle up to the top.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Carter said. “You got a plan?”
There was just the hint of sarcasm in the remark that might have been directed at Grayson’s combat fatigues, canteen and belt, but he let it go.
“How about I go up to the creek bed below the dam, cross it, then angle south along the base of Chicken Gizzard Mountain toward Hickman’s. You go due south. I think we’ll run across them way before we get to the rock.”
“Suits me.” Carter turned to go.
“Carter, one other thing.” His brother turned back guardedly. “Why don’t you call out to Sadie, not Maggie. Maggie will likely try to hide, but if Sadie hears your voice, Maggie won’t be able to shut her up.”
What he didn’t say was that he intended to remain silent. Sadie might be talked into hiding from him.
“Good idea.” Carter turned without another word and started off toward the woods. As he got into the trees, Grayson heard him begin to shout. “Sunshine! Where are you, Sugar? Suuunny!”
Grayson stood for a moment, considering. He almost went back into the house for the rifle—his heightened survival instinct told him it wouldn’t be a good idea to go into the woods unarmed. But if he took the rifle now, when there was no compelling need for it, he’d lose a round in his battle against irrationality. Besides, he didn’t want to face his wife holding the weapon in his hand she thought he’d used to cripple her little brother.
He turned and headed uphill into the trees.
Chapter 25
Piper watched out the kitchen screen door as the brothers talked briefly, then set out in different directions. She thought she heard Carter calling to Sadie, then both men disappeared from sight.
She stared for a moment at the thick woods that blanketed the mountainside and felt a wave of despair. How could they possibly find two little girls in hundreds of thousands of acres of—
“Piper, honey…” Marian’s voice was so weak!
Piper paused outside Marian’s doorway and forced a smile to her lips.
Marian was looking out her window and turned as Piper entered.
“Sugar, that fake smile m-m-makes you look like a shark—all teeth with eyes cold as frozen d-d-doorknobs.”
Piper collapsed into the chair beside the bed, put her head in her hands and waited for the tears to overwhelm her. But they didn’t come. She sat with her gut tied into so many different knots she was certain of only one thing. Untying them would cause even more pain than she felt now.
Marian reached out her trembling hand and placed it tenderly on Piper’s shoulder. It was like being touched by a cloud.
“We need to talk, you and m-m-me,” Marian said.
Piper lifted her head.
“What’s all this n-n-nonsense about Grayson shooting Zeke?”
Piper merely looked at her mother-in-law but could find no words anywhere inside to speak.
“Surely, you can’t p-p-possibly b’lieve—”
Marian’s face abruptly crinkled in a grimace of pain. She grunted and her hand slid off Piper’s shoulder. Then she clasped both hands over her belly and moaned softly.
“It’s past time for your medicine,” Piper said. She reached for the biggest of the three brown prescription bottles on the table, opened it and dropped two small white tablets into her palm.
The old woman shook her head.
“No,” she gasped. “Too dopey. It’ll…pass.”
Piper ignored her protest. She filled a small glass with water from the pitcher beside the pill bottles, then held it and the tablets out wordlessly to Marian. After a moment, the old woman reached out a trembling hand for the pills, and Piper helped her wash them down with a gulp of water.
In less than a minute, Marian began to relax, the tension eased out of her shoulders, and she settled back on the pillows.
“I’ll be right here,” Piper said. “You sleep now, and when you wake up, we’ll talk.”
Marian was already asleep.
Piper got up, walked out of the room and found herself in Sadie’s room. She picked up Rasmus off Sadie’s pillow—“nose gone, lost it.” Holding the teddy bear tenderly, she lifted the
toddler’s nightgown Maggie had dropped in the floor when she dressed Sadie, held it up to her nose and inhaled deeply. The little-girl smell of it brought tears to Piper’s eyes at last, and she began to cry. Not sob. Her hurts were too deep for anything as simple and cleansing as a good cry. Everywhere her mind touched, sliced her open to the bone. Sadie. Maggie. Marian. Zeke. Grayson. Even Carter.
The weight of it all pressed her down, and she found herself on her knees beside Sadie’s big-girl bed. She leaned her head over on her hands and began to pray.
Lord, please…what?
What do I say? What do I ask for? That you make Marian well? That you make Zeke walk again? I know you can, but do you anymore? And Grayson! What do I pray for him? He killed people. Something inside him died over there, too. Can you resurrect that? He shot Zeke!
Or did he?
Could Grayson possibly have—of course, he did! He went hunting, and he was at Blood Creek. How many men packing .22s just happened to be at Blood Creek on Thursday afternoon? It wasn’t like there’d been a squirrel-hunter convention in the woods. She sank back off her knees and sat on the floor in Sadie’s room, clutching her baby daughter’s teddy bear and nightgown. Sometime later, she was roused by a sound—it was a vehicle pulling up out front.
She leaped to her feet and ran for the front door. She could send whoever’d come to visit to find the sheriff, tell him two little girls were… She saw the truck.
Zeke? For a moment her mind stumbled. Zeke was here? She could imagine him getting down out of the truck, strolling up to the door with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and Nellie hung around his shoulder. Grinning. Always grin—
Though the illusion vanished, the truck was real. It was parked in the dirt in front of the house, but the man coming through the gate wasn’t Zeke. It was Riley.
Piper’s heart leaped into her throat. Her knees felt so weak she feared they’d drop her in a heap on the floor.
No. Oh, please Lord—No!
She stood at the screen door but couldn’t open it. Couldn’t speak, either, like she’d imagined all those times she’d have stood there unable to speak as the two officers in dress uniforms advanced up the sidewalk, their faces solemn.
Riley’s face wasn’t solemn. There was, in fact, a light in his eyes she’d never seen before. He didn’t look like a man who’d come to tell her their brother had…
“Riley,” she managed as he got to the porch and stopped. He stood staring up at her with an odd look—was it…satisfaction? “Has something happened to Zeke?”
“Yeah, somethin’ happened to Zeke. He got shot, and he can’t walk, that’s what happened to Zeke.”
“I mean, he didn’t…there wasn’t some problem, complication? He’s not…?”
“Dead? No. He ain’t ’xactly lovin’ life though, if you know what I mean.”
“Then why are you…?”
Riley could help them look! Three instead of two! She shoved open the screen door and raced out onto the porch.
“Oh, Riley, I’m so glad you’re here. Sadie’s gone! A little girl, Maggie, who’s been staying with us, took Sadie and ran away this morning. They’re out there”—she gestured up toward the mountain—“somewhere. Grayson and Carter are looking for them. They’re meeting at Hickman’s Thumb so you could catch them there and…” Riley should go for help! “No, no, you have go get the sheriff so they can organize a search party and—”
“Ain’t gonna be getting the law,” he said. She noticed for the first time that he had a rifle in his hands. A deer rifle.
“Riley, what are you doing here?”
“Come to see your husband.” He spit out the word like it tasted bad in his mouth. “Me and him’s gonna have ourselves a little family meetin’. I ain’t gonna do no talkin’, though.” He held up the rifle. “This here’s gonna say everything I got to say.”
“Riley?”
He squinted up at her. His cold, blue eyes looked dark, the dull gray of a stormy sea or of clouds bearing heavy snow. “Heard all about what happened ’tween you and him and Sheriff Cliff on Thursday. How he come out of the woods and drew down on the two of you, woulda shot you, too, if the sheriff hadn’t pulled a gun on him ’fore he had a chance. Too bad ole Cliff wasn’t there to face him down ’fore he put a bullet in my brother’s back.”
“Surely, you don’t believe Grayson would—”
“You know, there was a time I woulda thought not, him being a preacher ’n’ all.”
There was almost an air of joviality to the conversation. A smile thin as a filleting knife played across Riley’s lips. It dawned on her slowly, laboriously, like lifting something heavy, that Riley was enjoying torturing her. Payback for untold imagined slights over the years. Payback for the sack full of resentments that was his most prized possession. For marring a McCullough. For being a foot taller than he was!
“But the way I hear it, the preacher man ain’t the one come home. The one come home from Veet Nam is a crazy man. That crazy man’s the one done it.”
He paused and the genial façade vanished, leaving behind a coiled spring so taut she could almost feel the vibrating tension.
“But when I put a bullet in him, the man who’s heart’s gonna stop beatin’ will still be Grayson Addington.”
“Riley, no!” her hands flew to her mouth. She saw that he enjoyed the look of terror on her face.
“I ain’t decided ’xactly what I’m gonna do yet. I don’t know if I’m gonna shoot him in the back—right where he shot Zeke. ’Course, this being a 30.06, it’ll tear a hole right through him ’stead of paralyzing him.” He lifted the rifle then and pointed it at her face. She fought the urge to flinch and won and just stood looking down at him. “But I’ll probably put a bullet right there, center of his forehead, right ’tween his eyes.”
“You won’t get away with it,” she said. Ice had formed in her veins, and her voice didn’t shake. “You murder the Reverend Grayson Addington—a war hero—and they’ll strap you into Old Sparky in Moundsville, turn on the juice and fry you.”
“You think I care?” He screamed at her now, the restrained rage set free. “I ain’t got no intention of ‘gettin’ away with it.’ I’m gonna shoot Grayson Addington dead, drag his body out of the woods like a gut-shot buck and brag about it. Let ’em come and git me, take me away. Don’t matter to me. Long’s I get revenge—long overdue revenge—I’ll die a happy man!”
And he would, too. Riley didn’t care. All that mattered to him, all that had ever really mattered to him, was making the world and everybody in it pay for the raw deal he’d gotten in life. He was probably secretly glad Zeke had gotten shot. It’d given him the excuse he needed, the cause he could champion. Zeke had given Riley Campbell the opportunity to be the star of his own movie, and Riley would cheerfully play the part all the way to the electric chair.
He strode back to his truck, reached in the open driver’s side window, took the keys from the ignition and dropped them into his pocket. Then as casually as you’d kick a can out of the way, he pointed the rifle at the front tire of Piper’s Rambler and fired. She jumped at the roar. Had Carter and Grayson heard it in the woods? What if they had? They were unarmed!
He chambered another round and fired again, blowing out the front tire on Carter’s Camero.
“Case you was thinking ’bout going for the law. Filling the woods up with county Mounties or state po-lice.”
“But Sadie’s lost!”
“If nobody finds her, there’ll be one less McCullough in the world, and it’ll be a better place for it!”
He moved the rifle to the crook of his arm and started toward the backyard and the woods.
“Riley, please! Grayson didn’t—”
He turned on her, fast as a rattler, raised the gun and pointed it at her chest.
“Shut up! Rolling around in the sack with the man who put a hole in your kin. I oughta—One. More. Word. And you get dead today, too.”
She said nothing else. Jus
t watched helplessly as he walked away from the house. He stopped right before got to the woods and reloaded the rifle, then he disappeared into the trees.
* * *
Grayson heard a gunshot and stopped moving, breathing. The faraway sound came from behind him, down the mountain, he thought. Perhaps not. The roar that still rumbled in his ears like constant surf distorted sound to the point that the shot could have come from just about anywhere. He took another step and another shot rang out. He spun around—instinct!—and scanned the trees, listening as the sound echoed off the mountainside.
He saw nothing. Heard nothing else. But he didn’t think his hearing was lying to him about the gun that had fired the shots. It wasn’t a .22 or a shotgun. It was a deer rifle. Probably a 30.06.
Though nobody paid any attention to squirrel season, deer season was strictly enforced. And deer season didn’t open until the end of November.
His whole body ached for the weight of a rifle, the comfort of a weapon in his hand. Why had he talked himself out of going back for the .22? Not that a .22 would be any match for a 30.06 in a firefight.
Listen to yourself, Grayson! A firefight? Get a grip. You’re in the woods on a West Virginia mountainside, not—
He didn’t let his mind go any further, didn’t want to call up images of that other place for fear he’d be transported there against his will, like he’d already been shanghaied again and again since he got home. How long would it be like this, with reality blinking on and off like a Joe’s Beer Joint sign?
He shook it off and began to angle south in the general direction of Hickman’s Thumb, a more or less thumb-shaped granite outcrop thirty feet across and twenty feet tall that jutted out of a sheer ridge into a meadow. He scanned the undergrowth and the shadows—which were getting deeper now with the cloud cover overhead. By force of habit, he moved silently through the trees, looking for even a tiny splash of out-of-place color. Piper said Maggie had taken Sadie’s blankie, which was pink.
He didn’t call out to the children, but moved quietly through the trees. He had already come far enough to be seriously spooked! Of course, maybe Carter’d run into them a mile from home! Grayson hoped so, because if his brother hadn’t seen them either when the two met up…Grayson didn’t want to go there.
