When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  Carter felt utterly overwhelmed, totally unable to countenance what had happened to the younger brother he had once teased and played jokes on.

  It got quiet. Carter stared into the flickering flames of the campfire, watched them twist and cavort, Spanish dancers dressed in bright-red and orange dresses. Grayson looked out over the fire into the darkness of the forest beyond.

  “This part’s charred at least.” Carter’s voice sounded too cheery even in his own ears. “I don’t know if that means it’s done inside, but we can give it a shot.” He reached to pick the spit stick up off the rocks they’d pilled on both sides of the fire. “I need your knife.”

  Grayson said nothing. Didn’t move.

  “Gray?”

  Carter turned and looked full into his brother’s face. Grayson’s eyes were open, but they were moving, like your eyes move when you’re asleep and dreaming. Tears pooled there, then he blinked and they spilled down his cheeks.

  “Grayson,” he said softly. You weren’t supposed to wake up a sleepwalker, were you? Was this the same thing?

  “Ooshemy,” Grayson mumbled, his eyes darting, watching a movie Carter couldn’t see.

  Then he said it again, clearer: “Oot-shay e-may.” Pig Latin. Shoot me.

  * * *

  Piper had paced for hours. Had walked miles without ever leaving the house. She had worn a path from the back window in the kitchen to the side window that looked out over the side yard to the front door, across to the front window that looked out over the valley, down the hallway to Sadie’s room and back down the hall to the kitchen. Around and around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel…

  As she walked, her mind raced, wondering what she should do. After a while, after the sun went noon, then slid down the western sky, she wondered what she should have done.

  With a car, she could have roared down to the Craddocks, where she’d borrowed the coveralls for Maggie. The nearest neighbors, they lived in the first house on Northfield Road before town. She could have screamed at them to go get the sheriff—they didn’t have a phone either—then roared back up to the house. She would have been gone twenty minutes down and twenty minutes back up. A little over half an hour. She could leave Marian that long. After she took her medicine, she sometimes slept for hours.

  And sometimes she woke up five minutes later in agony, and Piper sat by the bed and talked to her, read to her, stayed with her. What if she woke up and Piper wasn’t there. What if Marian lay in the bed and died alone?

  Of course, when Riley blew out her tires, that had made all her decisions for her. There really was nothing Piper could do.

  Except wait.

  And worry.

  And pray.

  Only no words formed; no prayers came. All she could manage was to sob out their names, one at a time, with all the pain and fear and love attached to them and agonizing over what could be happening to them at that very moment.

  Sadie.

  Grayson.

  Carter.

  Maggie.

  She’d been so frantic with fear and worry about Zeke, but that receded now. Whatever lay ahead for the boy, at least he was safe, alive. That hadn’t seemed like much a few hours ago; now it was all in the world that mattered. And Marian was alive, too, at least for a little while longer.

  But the others…

  So around and around the house she went. Around and around in her head the horror images chased each other, monsters with vicious teeth and yawning mouths and the smell of moldering corpses on their breath.

  Marian slept after the pills Piper gave her when Grayson and Carter left. When she awoke, her eyes were cloudy, and she didn’t seem to know where she was. She called Piper Evelyn, her sister’s name, asked about Grayson and Carter as if they were boys off playing in the backyard. She talked about plaiting Becky’s hair before church on Sunday.

  The old woman’s incoherence terrified Piper. No matter how bad her pain or how sick she got, Marian had remained Marian. She had been there, alive. Now, she moved in and out of semiconsciousness and semiawareness.

  By midafternoon, Marian’s breathing had become labored. She moaned in pain. Then cried out. It was too soon to give her more medication. Should Piper give it anyway? There was no one to ask. No one to help her.

  Finally, she gave in and gave Marian more medicine, but not a full dose. The old woman’s moaning eased, and she slipped into an uneasy sleep.

  Piper went back to pacing.

  As darkness descended on Sadler Hollow, it descended into Piper’s heart as well. Her baby was out there in the woods in the dark. Her husband might be lying dead there, too. Alongside Carter.

  Or was Riley still looking for them? After all, his truck was still parked outside; he’d never come back for it.

  * * *

  Riley hadn’t come back for his truck because he couldn’t walk. After a while, he couldn’t even crawl. Eventually, he stopped moving altogether.

  He had left the Addington brothers at a dead run, anxious to put as much distance as he could between himself and the two men lest they change their minds and decide to use on him the gun he’d intended to use on them. Or worse. For the first fifteen minutes, he’d raced mindlessly through the woods, the skin on the back of his neck crawling as he flinched away from the bullet he feared any minute would ripe into his back.

  But it didn’t, so he slowed down. For almost an hour, he’d been merely jogging. That’s when it happened. A root caught his foot and he tripped and pitched forward headfirst down a steep slope. He saw the drop-off coming, clawed at the dead leaves and the dirt, dug in his hands and toes, trying to stop his downward slide before…

  He fell almost twenty feet into a rocky creek bed. Broke his right arm and his left leg in two places. Riley shrieked in agony, screamed for help until he had completely shredded his vocal chords and couldn’t make a sound. But he’d run so hard, so fast, he’d put a lot of distance between him and the Addingtons. So much that they couldn’t hear him.

  He actually dragged himself about fifty yards, clawing his way along the creek bank. Then his strength gave out. He knew his only hope was the search that would be mounted in the morning for the two missing children. His truck was still at Piper’s. Eventually, somebody’d figure out that Riley was still in the woods, too, and come looking for him.

  He had to hold out until then, that was all. He was near a creek so he had water. He was tough; he’d make it.

  * * *

  Grayson was getting more and more agitated, babbling pig Latin. Carter was afraid to touch him and hoped the mental convulsion would run its course, but he finally could no longer stand the pain on Gray’s face and the anguish in his eyes.

  Facing his brother on the log bench, he shook Gray’s shoulder gently.

  “Grayson. Bro. You okay? Gray, talk to me.”

  Grayson froze, then looked confused. He turned his gaze from the dark forest and stared hollow-eyed into his brother’s face.

  “Grayson, what—?”

  Gray’s eyes didn’t focus for a few moments, then he actually saw Carter instead of whatever freak show was playing at the drive-in movie of his mind.

  “There was a little girl, a pretty little girl. Her name was Nguyen,” Grayson said, his eyes locked on Carter’s. “I just remembered that I shot her.”

  He started to cry then, dropped his chin and put his face in his hands. Carter moved instinctively, reached out and took his little brother in his arms. Grayson began to sob, great heaving, wrenching sobs that went on and on. Carter held him tight, didn’t pat his back or anything, just held on. And he found he was powerless to stop the images of another little girl from forming in his head, and tears ran down his own cheeks and dripped into his brother’s hair.

  Chapter 29

  As it did every morning, dawn on the flatlands changed the slice of velvet black sky above Sadler Hollow to navy blue. The rising sun cycled the navy through countless other shades of blue, each more pale than the last. Bu
t this morning, Piper couldn’t see the transformation. She couldn’t see anything at all through mist that didn’t merely obscure the landscape but totally erased it.

  The cool creeks that rushed down the mountainsides breathed mist into the humid summer air every evening, swirling white gauze with ragged, tattered edges. The creek mist sometimes lingered until the sun cleared Naked Turtle Mountain to burn it off. But true fog was fairly rare, and fog as thick as pudding and this far up the mountainside was something Piper’d never seen in her whole life.

  She stepped out onto the front porch and couldn’t even make out the gate in the fence. If she hadn’t been beyond sobbing, she would have burst into tears. How could you find lost children in the woods when you couldn’t see them, when searchers and children alike were slogging through white quicksand?

  * * *

  Maggie stood on the front stoop of the little cabin in the woods and stared in disbelief at two things. No, she stared through the first thing at the second thing. Mist, thick as the white bubbles of dish soap in the sink, had scrubbed away the features of the nearest trees, making them vague and indistinct. Beyond them was nothing.

  What she could see through the mist that was closer than the trees was vague and ghostlike, too. But it was there. It was real. A road. Not a dirt track that meandered up the mountainside for miles and ended at this house. Before her lay a road that continued past the house and up the mountain. No more clambering through tangled undergrowth and stumbling over rocks. The road would take them effortlessly up.

  And they had to hurry! As soon as she opened her eyes this morning, the darkness began to grow in her head.

  Maggie fed Sadie fresh bread she found in the cabinet, smeared it with butter and jam from the icebox, and then took her out to the privy. She’d cleaned her up the best she could with well water last night before bed and brushed the leaves and twigs out of her hair with a comb she found on the dresser.

  “Where’s Mommy?” the little girl wanted to know. She was tired and cross. “Sabie wants Nana and Unka Cardur…and Daddy.”

  “We’ll see them real soon,” Maggie assured her. But would they? In the fog, could anyone escape the monster that was coming, even grownups?

  Maggie wanted to write a note to explain what had happened to the pie and the other supplies and to thank the folks who lived here for their unintentional hospitality. But there was no time. They had to go now. Leaving the mason jar and the flashlight inside on the table, she shoved Sadie in front of her out the door and hurried toward the road across the patch of dirt that passed for a front yard.

  It was coming.

  * * *

  Gray must have slept. He would have sworn he hadn’t closed his eyes for more than a moment, but he must have because when he opened them, the world was gone. Though there was a creek nearby, this was wasn’t mere creek mist. This was fog. He could barely see Carter, curled up on the ground beside the dead campfire.

  As the night hours had dragged by on terror-leaden feet, filled with nightmare images both real and imagined, he had clung to one hope like a drowning man to a hunk of driftwood. In the morning, the woods would fill with searchers. It wouldn’t just be he and Carter trying to find little needles in a hundred-thousand-acre haystack. They’d have help.

  Nothing lit a fire under mountaineers like word of lost children! Every human being above the age of twelve who wasn’t blind or lame would drop whatever they were doing and join in the rescue effort. There’d be hundreds of people, state police helicopters, tracking dogs. Two little girls on foot couldn’t possibly have gotten so far they couldn’t be located before they had to spend another night in the woods!

  He envisioned folding little Sadie in his arms, smothering her with kisses—whether she wiggled and struggled to get away or not. But now…how could you find anybody in this soup? It’d be gone by noon, maybe long before that, hard to tell, but the search needed to start at first light. This would cost them hours.

  “What in the world?” Carter had awakened. Maybe Grayson had said something aloud that roused him. Anymore, Gray had trouble sorting out what was reality and what was memory, let alone what he’d said aloud and what he’d merely thought.

  Carter sat up and looked around like a still-wet baby duck in half an eggshell. “Maybe this is only creek mist,” he said. He didn’t believe that any more than Grayson did.

  Grayson got to his feet, stiff and sore, feeling like a man of fifty rather than twenty-six. He was paying now for the hours of constant tension in every muscle in his body yesterday as he crawled slowly through the grass.

  “I’m not going to wait around for it to burn off,” Grayson said. He slipped his arms into the long-sleeved shirt he’d used as a pillow, grateful for the warmth in the chilled, damp air. Then he sat on the log and began to pull on his boots. “We can follow this creek upstream. And up seems to be the direction of choice for our little fugitives.”

  He lifted his eyes and saw that Carter was staring at the boots. Grayson looked closer now, too, examined the bottoms. All the red mud had worn away. But how had it gotten there in the first place?

  When Carter saw that Grayson had caught him staring, he stood quickly, turned and began to dust off his pants.

  “We’ll get above this soon—we’re pretty high now,” Carter said. Then he turned back to Grayson, his face set in grim lines. “I wonder…I’ve been thinking about Ma. If she…”

  “Yeah. I thought about her all night, too.” Her pained face was among half a dozen rip-your-guts-out images. “When we hook up with the other searchers, maybe you…”

  “I’ll go home,” Carter said. “You won’t need me. I’ll go sit with Ma.”

  Without another word, the two men turned, Carter picked up Riley’s deer rifle and they began trudging along beside the little stream. Up. Ever up.

  * * *

  Nelson Warren had intended to be headed back to Charleston by now and had planned to do what he’d come to do at dawn, but he was only now arriving at the Impoundment No. 2 dam!

  As soon as he drove into the mountains, he’d found the hollows and low spots awash in puddles of fog so thick he could only inch along. It had delayed him for hours. But now that he was up here above it all in the crisp morning sunshine, he thought to be grateful for the fog. The odds of being discovered, of somebody braving that soup to show up at an isolated dam site before church on a Sunday morning, were long enough even for a nonbetting man like Nelson Warren.

  He had approached the strip mine from the east side, through Cricket Hollow, and now stood on a hillside that granted him a view of both impoundment lakes and both dams. Beyond the dam on Impoundment No. 1, Sadler Hollow was filled almost to the brim with what looked like a puddle of Elmer’s glue.

  Warren pulled his new Grand Prix Pontiac off the dirt track bulldozed for the coal trucks that had hauled away millions of tons of black sunshine from this site. He parked near the dam but behind a hill. Didn’t want some random piece of flying debris to ding the shiny black-over-silver paint job.

  He opened the trunk and got out everything he’d loaded up in his garage the night before. Coveralls and boots, a miner’s helmet and headlamp, and a backpack containing the dynamite and fuses, which he very carefully shouldered and then set out across the dam to the spot where the end of the pipe protruded about four feet from the back side. He stopped, looked back at the hillside and let his eye measure the distance from the pipe to a point well above where debris from a small explosion might land. He’d have to be quick to get away from the dam and up to that point before the charge went off. Good thing he was a runner!

  He looked down at the pipe sticking out the back side of the dam. What happened here today would be the beginning of a tidal wave of events that he’d ride like one of those California surfers all the way from backwater West Virginia to Washington D.C. He started to whistle.

  * * *

  Grayson and Carter began to come out of the fog in less than half an hour. Up ahead, the whit
e gradually brightened. Like headlights seen through night mist, shafts of suffused light filtered down from the treetops to the ground. They left the creek bank then and climbed up out of the mist to the top of a rise and looked back down over the valley where a giant cotton ball had replaced all the features of the hollow.

  “Well, attention K-mart shoppers,” Carter exclaimed, and pointed through the trees to the left. “Is that…?”

  “Strawman Road? Has to be! Can’t believe we came this far.”

  Strawman Road had been so named because of the big scarecrow Jethro Donovan had set up in his little patch of corn next to where the dirt road curved away from Northfield Road and snaked up to the top of Chicken Gizzard Mountain, where a mining road that led to the strip mine and the impoundments split off it to the left like a casual part in a man’s hair.

  When the two men came out of the trees that hugged tight to the dirt road, both of them stopped at the same time, for the same reason. Before them in the powdery dust of Strawman Road were footprints! Two sets of small feet—one very small, wearing shoes, the larger one barefoot—had passed this way. Beside the smaller set, the dust was smeared, like perhaps a blanket had been dragging in the dirt.

  The trail led up, of course.

  Carter opened his mouth to call out, but Grayson stopped him.

  “They’ll stay on this road. No reason for them to go back into the woods—except to hide. We need to try to sneak up on them.”

  Carter didn’t look like he agreed, but he didn’t argue, merely nodded, turned, and began a slow lope up the road. Grayson fell in beside him.