RATTLEMAN: Praise for 18 Seconds 'Excellent! Stephen King

by George D. Shuman

  His mother said his father belonged to the Devil because he didn’t believe in the church or hell.

  His father said there weren’t any such things as devils and that they should open their windows and stop living in fear.

  Rolfe was afraid of what God would do if he heard his father’s blasphemy, but not his sister Kate; Kate believed her father and she wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Then came a day that their father had been drinking and arguing with his mother about going to see Reverend Holland. That evening he tore a cross from the wall and threw it in the fire. Then he picked up his coat and walked out the door.

  Their mother told them their father had decided to go and live with Satan. Later she dragged them into the woods and pointed to a stump hole and told them it was where their father was now.

  Kate called her a liar and took the beating for it, but Rolfe was terrified of the hole and never went near it again. Sin began to occupy his mind. He worried that the Devil could hear him thinking. He worried about becoming weak like his father. He thought the Devil would try to trick him into sinning or descending into the stump hole.

  A change started to take place after that day. Their mother started brushing out her hair and wearing pinafores over her black dress. One night she readied the buggy and told them she wouldn’t be taking them to church anymore. It was rather disturbing to a boy who had been home-schooled on religion. Church, though a terrifying experience, was nothing compared to the fear of being left alone and unprotected in the dark.

  Night was unsafe, their mother had always told them. Night was when men’s minds were idle and they thought about sin. Night was when the devils had most of their power, when they went looking for souls and young children to snatch for their fires. He looked up to the loft where he had once slept with his sister, remembered her lying there as branches scratched upon the roof. They had sounded like devil’s claws and the wind their icy breath. He would lie there with the knowledge that Kate didn’t believe in devils, worrying that God would hear her thoughts and let evil through the door.

  And one day he did.

  A bee entered the room and buzzed lazily in a circle before leaving to bother the Iron Weeds and Aster. He tried to remember his sister’s face, the way she looked before the devils got in, but her smile kept transforming into a scream.

  That evening he climbed the mountain and sat in the trees overlooking Kettle Hollow, watching people as they moved between tin roof shanties. Near dark, a woman appeared high on a field. She was climbing toward the tree line, picking dandelion and softly singing.

  A month of steady walking had kept him above the highways and trails of Tennessee and Kentucky. He had seen a few people since leaving Tennessee, but none of them women and none of them alone, until tonight. Until now.

  He felt his heart quicken.

  Chapter 7

  Iron Mountain, West Virginia

  Kettle Hollow could best be described as a cluster of dilapidated house trailers in a depression near the summit of the Iron Mountain, home to forty odd people who with the exception of old Dan Carnes had never wandered beyond the imposing shadows of the Appalachians. Carnes himself was born in the Hollow and educated like the others in a one-room schoolhouse that Hattie Wilson once taught, but back in the fifties he left to find work in Louisville and ended up joining a run-down carnival on its summer tour of the Bible Belt. That made Carnes the worldliest man on the mountain and that was why Carnes considered himself unofficial mayor of Kettle Hollow.

  There was no real connection between the Hollow and the state’s bureaucracy, save visits from a postal worker who delivered the public assistance checks and a stack of magazines Hattie Wilson read cover to cover before using them to light kindling in her wood stove. The only industry on the mountain was moonshining and the biggest employer was Grant Cooney, who lived a mile off in the woods.

  Matters of community interest though rare, were hashed out around Hattie’s woodstove and it was such a meeting today that brought Carnes to the front of the crowd.

  He took a moment to project a more serious expression by removing a filthy ball cap.

  “All of you heard Mary Saxe went missing yesterday. She was up on the hillside last night, tending to Willem’s goats. Tess saw her and so did Rachel and her little one.” He pointed to a child clinging to her mother’s skirt. “When she didn’t come home Willem went up to look for her and found some threads of her dress caught on the branch of a crabapple tree.”

  He stamped his feet, looking down at his worn boots. “Willem’s been up there most all of the night and I think it’s time we had a talk before we call the police.”

  Pete Krick stepped out of the crowd, pushing a sweat-stained cap back on his forehead and driving the toe of his boot against a board of the wooden floor. “So you’re thinking we need to call the police?” He squinted, catching the eye of two or three men around the room.

  Krick had a negative opinion of most everyone in the Hollow, but especially of old Dan Carnes. “Why is it that every time something happens around here, you want to call the police? You think the police know something special about girls that run away from home? We all know Mary’s run away before. It happens to all new brides.”

  Carnes took off his glasses and put them in the pocket of his flannel shirt. “It’s just we all know what a pretty little thing she is.” Carnes cleared his throat and patted the pocket where he had just put his glasses, feeling a little self-conscious about the way that had come out. He looked around for Willem and didn't see his head above the crowd, which meant he had probably gone back to his trailer. Then he looked at the Kelso boys whispering in the back of the crowd, chewing tobacco and grinning with their heads bent close together. “And if any one of you knows what happened to her, they best speak up now,” he said. “Once the law’s begun an investigation, they don't want to hear any excuses about there being some accident.”

  “Oh, I get it now.” Krick took a step toward him. “You’re implying that one of us had something to do with Mary’s disappearance.”

  Hattie Wilson’s voice cracked behind him. “Any of you geniuses give a thought about that woman’s head found up in Lake Nawakwa this spring?”

  All eyes turned to the stalwart woman sitting on the counter. She was cutting sections of an apple with a buck-knife. Hattie, who had taught most of them how to read and write, was still an imposing figure at seventy-four.

  “I don’t see what one’s got to do with the other,” Krick said, shifting his weight. “Whoever she was she didn’t come from around here. Everyone knows that.”

  “And you don’t think it’s significant that someone was murdered a mile from here?” She chewed a piece of the apple, looking around the room. “Doesn’t it worry any of you about your women and your children?”

  “Ain’t no –”

  “Ah, shut up, Krick.” Hattie slapped the palm of her hand against the counter. “The only reason you don’t want the police here is because there’s moonshine cooking behind your trailer. Every one of you men should be up there helping Willem search for his wife instead of jawing about who’s calling who. I give you fair warning. I’ll be calling the police myself if she doesn’t turn up by morning.”

  Krick ripped the hat from his head and crushed it in a fist on his way toward the door, and slowly the others began to follow.

  Chapter 8

  Marion, West Virginia

  “Line one, is Hattie Wilson,” Sergeant Watson yelled.

  Marty punched the phone and laid the newspaper aside.

  “Hattie?” he said. There was a clicking noise on the line.

  “Marty, that you?”

  “Here,” he said and the connection became clear. “Everything okay up there?”

  “You remember Willem Saxe? You met him the morning Buc Thompson found the woman’s head in Lake Nawakwa.”

  “I’m sure it would be in my notes.”

  “Willem’s wife went missing yesterday evening. I did
n’t call when it happened because Willem wanted to check with the girl’s family in Quills Landing. She’s only eighteen and he thought she might have run home to her parents. Anyhow he’s been down there and the family hasn’t seen her. Just thought you should know.”

  Marty put his feet down, a sinking feeling in his stomach. “Anyone check the lake, Hattie?”

  “I know Willem’s been up there with a few of the others. Dan Carnes found some light blue thread caught in a thorn apple above the hillside. It was the color of one of Mary’s dresses, Willem said. Might be nothing or it might not be good.”

  “I’ll see you in an hour.” He disconnected.

  Marty looked up to the map on his wall and the pushpins he had stuck in Durbin and Lake Nawakwa. Two places that no percentage of the population had ever heard of or cared to, but a woman had started out alive at one and ended up dead at the other and there was no logical route in between. Which was what troubled him most about the revelation of an immigrant serial killer going up and down the Appalachians. How had a complete stranger in a truck with out-of-state tags found his way from Durbin to Lake Nawakwa on a Thanksgiving morning and not be seen? Marty had never disputed the forensics. That was not his issue. It was just that no one in Washington could appreciate how wary mountain people could be.

  He had heard from Major Johnny Lazarus, family friend and commander of the state police criminal investigations unit out of Charleston, that there was an emerging theory about the man the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had dubbed the Mountain State Butcher. It seemed migrant workers who picked squash and tobacco in eastern Tennessee took up residence around Tellico Plains before they moved north to find work in the winter.

  He had to admit that the migrant worker theory made sense if you stepped away from the map. It was true that a large number of people moved north and south between jobs. Field workers became minimum wage housekeepers and dishwashers, cooks and landscapers at the seasonal resorts. There were even migrant workers on the natural gas wells and oil pipelines. They had holed up in small hotels, intermingled with the locals and learned about the geography as they moved from state to state. A migrant serial killer who chose his victims at random might easily be overlooked before they moved on. And depending on their line of work, some might know the perfect place to dispose of a body.

  But how would a migrant have found their way to a cave on Blood Mountain or a lake so remote as Nawakwa without being seen?

  The alternative of course was a man who didn’t drive. Who didn’t need to understand the complicated back roads or worry about some policeman pulling him over because he looked lost or had a broken tail light; a man that came down off the mountains to hunt people.

  Now that would be one dangerous son of a bitch.

  Marty told Sam to call two officers to meet him in Kettle Hollow, then grabbed an extra box of radio batteries and carried them to his Jeep. The drive up the mountain took just over forty minutes.

  He marveled at how nothing ever seemed to change in Kettle Hollow. Year after year the same truck axle would be lying on the side of the road, threadbare tire hanging from the limb of a tree, rusty Ford tailgate leaning against an old fence post. He drove past the hodgepodge of shanties and trailers and parked off the side of the road in front of Hattie Wilson’s store.

  Three young boys sat on a tractor tire, passing a hand-rolled cigarette and blowing smoke through their nostrils. A sign above them read ‘General Store’.

  “Seen Willem?” Marty asked.

  One of the boys thumbed at the door.

  Dan Carnes was sitting by the woodstove on an antique student desk.

  Willem Saxe at nearly six-foot-three stood behind him, looking uncomfortable as Marty approached.

  “Mind if we talk private?” Marty asked Willem.

  Willem shook his head.

  “This is from her dress,” Carnes interrupted, holding up some blue threads. “Found them on a thorny apple on top of the hill.”

  Marty took the threads and stuffed them in his shirt pocket, turned to Willem and nodded toward the door.

  “Outside,” he said gently.

  Willem nodded and followed him to the door. The boys and their cigarette were gone as they stepped into daylight.

  “Did you two have words?” Marty looked at Willem’s eyes.

  Willem shook his head.

  “You get along with her kin okay?”

  Willem nodded.

  “Was she seeing anyone serious before you two got married?”

  Willem said no.

  “But she’s run away before?”

  “Twice,” Willem said. “When she was sixteen she hitched a ride from one of the truckers in Quills Landing. The state police found her at a gas station in Fairfield and brought her back to her mother’s. Once right after we got married she ran back to her parents’ house.”

  “But not this time?” Marty asked.

  Willem shook his head. “She was done with all that. I think she’s still up there.”

  A red pickup truck came toward them, turned off the dusty road and pulled in behind Marty’s Jeep. Seconds later a white one pulled in too, and Sergeant Sam Watson climbed from the cab.

  “Two teams, Sam,” Marty pointed up the hill. “I’ve got extra radios in the Jeep. I’m going up with Willem here,” he patted the big man’s back. “You guys take up the others.”

  Marty didn’t expect to find anything that Willem and the others hadn’t found, but you never knew what was on a man’s mind or what he would say when you got him away from his friends. Maybe someone in the Hollow had been paying a bit too much attention to his new wife or maybe the couple had an issue he couldn’t talk about in public.

  But Willem said nothing of the kind and the search went on until dark. Marty showed the Tennessee surveillance photo of a man by a gray truck to every household in the Hollow. They searched the lake and had a Division of Forestry helicopter fly over firebreaks and power lines looking for any sign of a gray truck. Mary Saxe didn’t turn up that day or the next. Marty knew that she could still be up there, lost but alive, maybe injured in a fall. Whole armies could miss a non-responsive victim in the mountains. Nights were cold and a person could lose their strength. Once you couldn’t defend yourself anymore the scavengers would move in and when you were dead they would scatter your bones like you never existed.

  Or maybe she had never been lost and was pulled into the trees on the top of the hill. Maybe the man that put Annie Myers in Lake Nawakwa was back on the mountain.

  It was eleven o’clock and there were messages on Marty’s voicemail.

  One was from a cable news reporter who had heard there might be another missing girl on the mountain. She wanted to know if Marty’s office had comments. Another sounded like a sleepover of ten-year-olds making grunting noises into the phone. And then there was Kirsten Berkley, the forensic cop, who called to let him know that her husband was out of town. The last was from Major Lazarus, a long-time friend of the Wayne family and commander of the state police criminal investigation unit based in Charleston. Johnny Lazarus was part of a federal task force charged with finding what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had dubbed the Mountain State Butcher.

  Marty walked to the wall map and put his thumb on Tellico Plains, stretching his finger to touch the Iron Mountain and there was nothing to pinch between but the Appalachian Range.

  He deleted all the messages and dialed Lazarus in the state capital.

  “Shouldn’t an old man like you be home in bed at this hour?”

  “I’m on my way home,” Lazarus growled. “What in the hell do you want?”

  “How can you be going home and answer your office phone at the same time,” Marty asked.

  “I have call forwarding, you idiot. Don’t they have modern technology up there?”

  “I’ve got another woman missing on the Iron.”

  “Have to speak up, Marty. I just left the carnival and the family is snoring like a pack of wolverines.”


  “I said there’s another woman missing on the Iron,” he said louder.

  “Jesus, tell me.”

  “Not much to tell. She’s eighteen, married, last seen walking up a hillside over Kettle Hollow. That was three days ago now.”

  There was a pause. “Her husband did it,” Lazarus said.

  “Not this time, Johnny.”

  “What about the neighbors? A sex crime?”

  “We’re getting to know each other, but nothing like that yet.”

  “And why are you calling me?”

  “I want some troopers and helicopters if I can get them. I think he might have come back.”

  Lazarus didn’t answer for a moment. “What’s the problem with asking the barracks commander,” he said at last.

  “She’s got a history as a runaway. Twice.”

  Lazarus sighed out loud. “Nobody facing manpower cuts is going to bleed their budget over a runaway. You’ve done your search, which is the most anyone can do. There comes a point where you have to move on.”

  “It could be him,” Marty said.

  “But what if it’s not?”

  “It’s where we found Annie Myer’s head,” Marty insisted.

  “Well then let me just tell you,” Lazarus said, “it’s not him.”

  “Is that an assumption or are you stating a fact?” Marty asked.

  “Just take my word for it, Marty.”

  “Johnny,” he said sternly.

  “Oh come on, Marty.”

  “You know something, Johnny. And I need to know it too.”

  There was a long moment of silence when Johnny’s words simply faded away with the unstable signal up here in the Appalachians. Marty thought he’d lost the call, then he heard Lazarus speak again. “This isn’t for the press or even your girlfriend,” he said.

  “Jesus, Johnny, you’ve known me all your life.”

  “He was spotted in Pennsylvania.”