by Hank Early
He kicked me in the face.
“Maggie killed herself because of you. So shut”—he kicked me again—“up!” The next kick made me almost lose consciousness.
He paused to catch his breath.
I tried to reposition myself and brace for the next onslaught.
But the next onslaught never came. He had just caught his breath and straightened up when the door swung open.
A deputy I didn’t recognize stood in the doorway, his mouth open in shocked awe.
“Sheriff?” he said.
“I had to,” he said. “He’s a rapist. And he killed my little girl.”
The deputy shuffled his feet and looked at the floor. “Want me to take him to a cell?”
“Yeah. I want him to live at least long enough for him to get what’s coming to him in prison.”
The deputy came over, obviously nervous, and unlocked the handcuffs. He guided me out of the room and down the hall into a cell.
I collapsed on the hard bed, moaning in pain. But it was more than just physical pain. It was the knowledge of time wasting.
As if to remind me of the storm’s increasing fury, there was an explosive crack of thunder that shook the cell and caused the single bulb hanging above my bed to flicker and go out.
The darkness lasted just long enough for me to see my father standing in the corner of the cell. His body glowed with something like radiance, and his eyes glared at me, unblinking. Just as the lights returned, I realized he was a demon too.
It was quite possible we all were.
54
I was asleep when I heard Mary’s voice.
At first I thought it was part of my dream, especially when the cell door swung open and she kissed my cheek.
I blinked my eyes and sat up, taking the smell of her in, feeling an untimely sense of arousal at her presence.
“I came as soon as I heard.”
“It’s not true,” I said. She hugged me tightly, pressing her body into mine.
“I know. I don’t believe any of it.”
“Thanks.”
“But I need you to fill me in.”
“Okay.”
“On everything.”
“Sure.”
“No. I don’t think you understand. I need to know what happened in the past. It’s like I’m playing cards without a full deck here. It makes getting to the bottom of this thing nearly impossible.”
“I thought you were off the case?”
“I am.” She stood up and took off her badge and tossed it on the floor. “I’m completely off all cases. I’m only here for you now, and for the victims of these mountains.”
I shook my head, wincing. “Are you sure about this? What about Granny?”
“I’ve got enough money saved to stay with Granny. And I refuse to work for a corrupt sheriff. Now talk. Tell me everything.”
I had to admit, even when I made up my mind to tell her, it was hard, especially when I came to the stuff about Maggie. She listened attentively, putting her hand over mine when I got to the part about meeting Maggie in the cedar grove. When I faltered, telling her about the sound of the breeze moving the rope, she put a finger to my lips.
“I understand. You don’t have to talk about it.”
But it was too late. I did have to talk about it. In voicing my past, something unexpected was happening: I didn’t feel so powerless in the face of my regret.
I pushed on, telling her everything, only stopping after I’d made it to the part about staying with Granny.
When I finished, she didn’t say anything. The rain was coming down harder now. The thunder and lightning had ceased for the time being. There was only the sound of the constant downpour on the roof of the jail. We were alone. There were no other prisoners in the other cells. The nearest person was the desk sergeant, and he was several solid walls away. I felt myself unwinding. Everything that had been inside me, curled up tight like a swollen fist, opened up and was set loose, as if a dam had been breached and the pressure alleviated.
Still not speaking, Mary leaned in and kissed me lightly on the lips. It hurt a little from where Shaw had punched me in the mouth, but it didn’t matter. It felt so good, the pain was far away.
She locked her eyes on mine.
“I’m not sure if this is . . .”
She kissed me again. I worried about the impropriety of me being fifty and her being nearly fifteen years younger. I worried about my busted lip—was it still bleeding? Would she care? I worried about hurting her. Most of all I worried about my own inability to let somebody in.
Except I’d already done that, hadn’t I? I’d just told her everything. There was nothing I’d held back, and this, along with the sensory overload of her lips and tongue and her body pressing itself so urgently against mine, was enough to make me give in.
I slid my hand across her flat belly, and she murmured encouragement. I pushed under her shirt and cupped a breast beneath her bra. My other hand moved down to her thigh, and the friction my palm made against the denim of her jeans burned.
The rest of it happened fast despite the lingering pain from Shaw’s beating. Somehow the pain hurt a little less as we locked our bodies together and found a pace I could only describe as frantic. And perfect. Most of my encounters over the years had been fast like this one. One-night stands, acted out without real passion, only lust. Sometimes the one-night stand turned into a month or two, but the passion, the true feelings, had been absent. Not so now. I wanted her body, sure, but I also wanted her, some nearly unattainable essence of her that I longed to release and absorb.
As I began to climax, she squeezed both of my hands and moaned loudly. I kissed her, silencing the moan, but I still felt her vocalizations reverberating inside my mouth.
When it ended, I tried to move off her, but she pulled me back. “Stay. Just a few more minutes.”
I understood. It felt safe here, our bodies intermingled. When it ended, when I had to pull myself away, there would be a hard and bitter world waiting.
As if to remind us just how hard and bitter and full of danger, a low rumble of thunder shook the jail cell.
“We better get moving,” she said, standing and pulling her jeans back up.
“Moving?”
“Yeah, we’re leaving.”
“We can’t just walk out the front door.” I looked at her. She was already by the cell door. “Can we?”
“When I came in, Shaw had just left. That means there’s only Crowe at the desk and Winston around back. I’ll distract Winston and meet you out back.”
“That easy?”
“They don’t even know I’m here. Why would they think you’d be able to walk out on your own? Give me ten minutes and then head for the back door.”
She started to leave but stopped.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that, Earl.”
“Don’t be. I have to take responsibility. If I hadn’t ever slept with—”
“You were seventeen. No seventeen-year-old should be held accountable for an act like that. Especially one who’d suffered through what you did.”
I wanted to believe her. I really did. But then I thought about my encounter with Lester a few days back. His dismissiveness, his complete unwillingness to even talk things through.
She came back over to the cot where I was laying. She leaned over, breathing on me.
“Kiss me,” she said, her lips already grazing against mine. I reached for her hand and held it and the kiss for a long time.
She pulled away. “Ten minutes. Wait for me out back.”
“And then what?”
“Then we go to that well on your map.”
“Not yet,” I said, realizing there was something else that couldn’t wait.
“What do you mean not yet? Baylee could be there right now.”
I nodded. “I know. Which is why I plan to make this quick.”
“Plan to make what quick?”
“The visit to Lester.”
“No, but I have to.” I looked at my watch. It was a little after midnight. “If he’s not home, I think it will tell us a lot.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think it could be happening tonight. The lightning. The storm. If he’s involved, he’ll be at the well.”
“Okay, what if he is home?”
“Then I want to ask him where he stands. I want to ask him for his forgiveness, and I want to ask him for his help.”
55
Lester’s home was in the city limits of Riley, nestled in a patchwork subdivision of trailers and regular houses. He had one of the houses, and one of the nicer ones, at that.
Mary pulled into his driveway behind a pickup truck. A single light was on inside.
“Should I wait?” Mary asked.
“Yeah. I’ll try to keep it short.”
I gave her a quick kiss before jumping out of the car and sprinting through the rain to his front door. I had no intention of coming back. If Lester wasn’t home, I’d slip away into the trees behind his house. Go do what had to be done on my own. If he was home . . .
I decided not to get carried away. One thing at a time.
I rang the doorbell.
After a few moments, I rang it again and knocked on the door with my fist.
A light came on in the back of the house. I breathed a sigh of relief. He was home. Which meant he wasn’t somewhere in the mountains torturing Baylee. There was no guarantee he hadn’t done it before, but at least, at this moment, his presence made clear one of two things—he wasn’t involved or Baylee wasn’t presently being tortured.
Another light, this time in the foyer, came on, and I saw him walking toward the door. He looked old, far older than he should have. He would be fifty-two now, but he looked ten years older. He pressed his face to the glass on the side of the door and shook his head when he saw me.
“Can we talk?” I said.
His expression was unreadable through the glass, and for a second, I feared he was simply going to turn away, leave me on my own to deal with whatever it was I was about to experience, but then he reached for the door and he let me inside.
* * *
I sat on the couch in his den. He fixed us both coffee and then sat in a recliner opposite me.
“I’m here to apologize again,” I said.
He stared at me. “What happened to your face? Looks like you took a beating.”
“Never mind that. I want to tell you how wrong it was of me to do what I did with Maggie. I was a stupid kid.”
“Stupid kids don’t convince girls to kill themselves.”
“I didn’t do that, Lester.”
“I saw you talking to her the day of the suicide. She carved your name on her body, Earl. Do you really expect me to believe you had nothing to do with it?”
“No. That would be foolish. But I also want you to see that we all had something to do with it. Every person in that community. But nobody more than our father.”
He swallowed some more coffee and looked at the rain-streaked windows behind me.
“She’d still be here today if you hadn’t gotten her pregnant,” he said. “That’s on you.”
“Would she? Do you really believe a girl like Maggie would have made it much longer in that environment?”
He rolled his tongue over his front teeth. He was uncomfortable, which meant he was considering that I might be right.
“Why are you here?” he said.
“Because I need your help.”
“I mean why are you in Georgia? Why even come back?”
“I came back for Granny.”
“The woman who took you in?”
“That’s right.”
He looked like he wanted to say something hurtful, something mean, but there was nothing to say.
“But you stayed,” he said.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“I also came to find Bryant McCauley. He contacted me in North Carolina. I simply wanted to tell him to leave me alone.”
“Bryant McCauley.” He said the name with disdain. “He’s the fool that started all of this. I don’t reckon you found him?”
“Oh, I found him. He’s dead. Killed by Chester. Remember Choirboy? ’Course you do. He was hanging around the church the day I came to visit you. What do you mean when you say McCauley’s the fool who started all of this? All of what?”
He ignored the last question and instead answered the first one. “Chester still goes to the Holy Flame, but I’ll be honest with you, Earl. I wish he didn’t. I’m trying to change the church’s image. I want to put a positive spin on things. Stop living in the past and making everything about hell.”
“What’s stopping you?”
He stood up and walked over to the window before pacing back to his chair. He didn’t sit though. Instead he continued to move around as he spoke.
“There’s resistance to it. Some people—especially the older folks—say I’m a false prophet. There’s also some . . .”
“Go on.”
“Some who say Daddy is still alive. Bryant McCauley was one of them. But there’s others. I hear most of it secondhand, you know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I know Choirboy is involved, and I’m pretty sure Hank is too, but that’s all I can figure.”
“Where’s Thrash stand on the issue?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t really know. The truth is we haven’t had a real conversation in months. He just glad-hands folks on Sundays and sings my praises as far as I can tell, but he doesn’t have much to say to me.”
I thought about it. “Seems like the same ones who you suspect are in the ‘Daddy is alive faction’ are the same ones who are out to get me.”
“How so?”
“Choirboy tried to kill me recently. Wanted to leave me for dead with some cottonmouths.”
“But you escaped?”
“Yeah, it went the other way. He was the one that got bitten.”
“Explains why I haven’t seen him lately.”
“Shaw is out to get me too. He’s saying—” I stopped, unsure I wanted to mention the accusations to Lester. Our peace—if you could even call it that—felt extremely tenuous.
“Saying what?”
“That he wants me out of town.” I gestured to my swollen face. “He made sure I got the point.”
“Well, that shouldn’t surprise you.”
“No, I guess it shouldn’t.” I took a deep breath. We seemed to have reached a stalemate. “Well,” I said, “I wanted to apologize again. I never intended to hurt you.”
He sat there.
“I also wanted to asked for your help.”
“My help?”
“Yeah. I think they’re doing it again.”
“Who’s doing what again?”
“Torturing the young girls. Like they did Maggie. And I’ve found out about more too.”
“And what, you’re going to stop this torture?”
“I’m going to try.”
“You’re a fool, Earl. Always have been.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve said my peace. I apologized.” I stood up and looked at the back door.
“One more thing,” I said.
He just looked at me.
“Go on.”
“Do you think he’s alive?”
Lester looked away. A single tear dropped down his cheek. He seemed to be fighting hard not to break down.
“Well?”
“I need to tell you something,” he said, wiping his face with both palms.
“Okay.”
“I think it’s important.”
“I’m listening.”
“They’re blackmailing me.”
“What? Who is blackmailing you?”
“I’m not sure. I think it might be Shaw. Sometimes I think Thrash is involved.” He shook his head and kicked the couch. “Maybe even Daddy.”
“I don’t un
derstand.”
“Sit back down. Don’t leave. You’re the only person I can tell.”
56
“I saw his body with my own eyes,” Lester said. “His face had been pecked apart, but it was him. Everything about the body screamed ‘Marcus.’” He gestured to me. “You and me aren’t exceptions. The thick neck, the hairy arms, all of it. He had on his wedding ring, Earl. It was him.”
“Okay. I believe that.”
“And he was dead. No two ways about it. Not a breath left in his body. Then we had the funeral, and he hadn’t been in the grave more than three days before Bryant McCauley—stupid fool that he was—started telling the whole world that RJ Marcus was alive, that he’d ‘ascended.’”
“Did people believe him?”
“At first I think most of them didn’t. But that changed when he came to church that day talking about the well.”
“What about the well?”
“He said Daddy had told him about it to prove that he was still alive. It worked. Suddenly everybody thought he was alive.” He looked at me closely. “Do you know something about the well?”
I took a chance. “I think it’s where they took Maggie. And maybe the others, maybe Baylee.”
“What did you say?”
“I think the well is the place where they punish the girls.”
“No, not that. Did you say Baylee?”
“Yeah, our cousin’s girl.”
“Baylee?” He seemed very agitated now, and I felt the air shifting in the room. The temporary peace might have been over before it had really begun.
“What about her?” he said through pinched lips.
“She’s missing. I think she may be at the well. Again.”
“Again?”
“I saw marks on her. They were consistent with the marks that were seen on a woman named Allison DeWalt, who we also believe went to the well.”
At the mention of Allison’s name, he went rigid.
“Are you okay, Lester?”
“I’m fine. I just need a minute to process . . .” He stood up and walked into the kitchen. I waited for what seemed like a long time for him to come back. I was about to go look for him when he rounded the corner holding a bottle of Wild Turkey. He unscrewed the cap and took a long pull. He held it out to me, and I took one as well.
