by Jen Blood
“Erin okay?” George finally asked, when I didn’t volunteer the information.
“Yeah. She’s… uh, she’s with Sally right now. She’s all right,” I added, at the concern on his face. When I realized that I didn’t actually know if that was true, I fell silent. George dragged the conversation along with small talk for a few minutes before he pulled up short.
“You got something on your mind you want to talk about?”
I nodded, grateful that he’d dispensed with the pleasantries. “I had a couple of questions, actually. About Jesup Barnel.” Long before the Kentucky apocalypse Solomon and I had just survived, Reverend Barnel and George Durham had run in the same circles. It wasn’t something George liked to talk about, I knew, but in this case it couldn’t be helped. “You mind talking a little?”
“I’ll tell you what I can.”
“You and Barnel grew up together, right? Before he became a lunatic preacher…”
“We did.”
“Do you remember anyone taking any special interest in him? Or possibly both of you? Any kind of group... Or an individual, maybe?”
“Taking a special interest how, exactly? We was just a couple of backwoods boys—not too many folks took an interest in anybody, back this way.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding as I reframed what I’d been thinking. “Do you remember when Jonestown happened, then? It was 1978—November of that year. You remember Barnel ever mentioning Jim Jones? Or his church?”
“Jim Jones was a little hippie dippie for these parts, you know?” He was genuinely puzzled now, forehead furrowed. “Nobody ‘round here was too impressed with the guy, even before he killed all those folks.”
“So no one ever came and talked to you about… anything. Jim Jones, or a way to… I don’t know, influence people?”
He scratched his head. “What the hell are you talking about, son? I told you—” He stopped suddenly, his eyes clouded. For a second or two, I watched as he worked through some long-forgotten memory.
“What is it?” I prompted.
“When we was young, grade school age, Jesup got recruited for some special group or something… He never talked about it much. When he was real young, he could be uppity about the whole thing—saying he’d been chosen over everybody else. But it kept going over the years, just a couple times a week, and after a while he stopped talking about it and we stopped asking. It just got to be one of those things, a couple afternoons a week when we knew Jesup wouldn’t be around.”
“But no one ever came to talk to you about anything?” I pressed. “No one ever talked to you about joining this… group?”
“I told you,” he insisted. “I reckon I would’ve remembered something like that, don’t you?”
I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I ran through a mental list of the other people involved with the drama that had unfolded in Justice, Kentucky, with Jesup Barnel. “What about the sheriff—Harvey Jennings? Did you ever hear of him being in a group with Barnel?”
“You mean besides Jesup’s cockamamie church? How in Hades would I know that?”
“Forget it—it was just a shot in the dark.” I pulled out the page of numbers Solomon and I had decrypted. It was a bad move to have it here. A bad move to pull anyone else into this, when the Durhams had already lost so much.
I scrubbed my hand over my jaw, the exhaustion I’d kept at arm’s length for the past seventy-two hours washing over me. There was no one to trust. No way out. George looked at me curiously.
“What’ve you got there, son?”
I pushed the paper into his hand before I could change my mind. “Do any of these numbers mean anything to you?”
He took a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and leaned back on the porch swing, going through the list entry by entry. Before he’d gotten far, we were interrupted by a shout from across the yard. I looked up to find a short, plump blonde woman striding toward us.
“Thank God,” she said at sight of me.
I grabbed the paper from George and stuffed it back in my pocket, already trying to come up with some kind of plausible story to explain the bullshit the press was putting out about Solomon and me. Mae Durham stepped up onto the porch without breaking stride, ignoring George, and pulled me into her arms.
“You scared the unholy dickens out of me, you fool. What’s this about you being one of America’s most wanted?”
“It’s a long story,” was the best I could come up with. Mae nodded seriously. If possible, she looked even more tired now than she had when I’d left Justice—as though the reality of everything she’d gone through was just sinking in. Newly widowed and now raising three kids on her own, it wasn’t a reality anyone would envy.
“It’s never anything else with you, is it?” she asked. She didn’t push for any answers beyond that, moving onto the next topic without so much as a breath in between. “What about Erin? Where is she?”
“She’s okay. I mean… she will be. I think.” My voice broke. I looked away, mortified when my eyes started to tear.
George and Mae exchanged a look. “George, you mind gettin’ us some of that Mississippi mud you call coffee?” she asked.
He looked grateful for an excuse to run, squeezing my shoulder before he went back inside. Mae sat down beside me, but I was grateful that she made no move to touch me. It wouldn’t take much to turn me into a blubbering mess—and I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d let that happen.
“Where’s Erin, Diggs?” she asked.
I stole a cigarette from George’s pack and lit it on a long inhale. It was the first one I’d smoked in months. I breathed deep, staying quiet until I felt the nicotine settling my nerves. “She’s with Sally,” I said. “We were in Tennessee, and these guys—these… cops, I guess, were chasing us. And shooting. She got hit.”
Mae’s hand tightened on my leg, but otherwise she didn’t react. I took one more draw from the cigarette and made myself put it out.
“But she’s all right, you said?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I focused on a cracked floorboard and breathed through the fear. “She’s… Sally took care of her. I didn’t know where else to go—the cops are after us, and the… these people, are monitoring everything we do. I couldn’t take her to a hospital.”
“How do you manage to get yourself into these messes?”
I shook my head with a strangled laugh. “Hell if I know. I blame Solomon, though.”
“Is Sally still working on her?”
“No.”
The same image I couldn’t seem to shake flashed through my mind again: Solomon in the backseat, lying in a pool of blood—small and broken, and I had no idea how to fix her. I pushed the memory away, trying to summon the rage I’d felt before, that frustration at Solomon for pulling stupid stunts that put her life in danger time after time. It was gone now, though… All I felt was fear. That same sob I’d choked back before welled up again.
This, in a nutshell, is why love is a bad idea: Ultimately, you end up crying like a fucking baby on someone’s shoulder while you wait for fate to decide whether life will go on or just… stop. Before any tears could escape, I wiped my eyes with the back of my arm and forced myself to get a grip.
George was standing by with a cup of coffee, which he handed off straightaway, then settled himself in the rocking chair across from us.
“You haven’t eaten, I reckon,” he said.
I thought of the grapes and potato chips with Solomon at midnight, the sheet twisted around her freckled thigh. “Not today, no. Well—part of a grilled cheese, at Sally’s.”
“Slept?”
Again, the night before came to mind: Solomon wrapped around me, moving under me, her body pressed to mine. I shook my head. “I got an hour or two last night.”
“Well, that’s half your problem,” Mae said with authority. “You can’t run nothin’ on no food and no sleep—and you sure as heck can’t save the world that way
. Let me make up a plate for you. Then, my advice to you is to go on back to Sally’s, get some rest, and wait for Erin to wake up.”
“And if she doesn’t?” I asked. The tears were gone from my voice, but I still hardly sounded like a rock.
“If she doesn’t, you’ll go on,” she said firmly. “But how about we try thinking best-case scenario for a change, huh? Now, come on: we start with the basics ‘round here. Food first.”
It wasn’t until Mae was setting a heaping plate of grits, homemade toast, and a five-egg omelet in front of me that I remembered I’d come here, ostensibly, for a reason. I pulled the list of numbers from my pocket and pushed it across the table.
“I’m trying to find some connection to Jesup Barnel in these numbers,” I said. “I don’t have a clue what form that might take, but I know you had more to do with Barnel’s church than a lot of people, for a while.”
I’d barely taken the first bite before she was immersed in the problem.
“These first numbers look like they could maybe be coordinates…”
“That’s what Sol and I decided, too,” I agreed, impressed that she’d spotted it so quickly.
“I love all them puzzles they have in the Sunday paper: Sudoko and word scrambles, all that silly stuff. Wyatt always used to say I was wasted living around here, raising a bunch of kids.”
“You’re probably doing more good here than you’d be at some job crunching numbers somewhere,” I said. She smiled, nodding her agreement as she continued poring over the list.
“Have you tried looking them up?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The coordinates work, but the numbers afterward are what I can’t make sense of. Nothing comes up in an Internet search.”
I looked over her shoulder, scanning the numbers myself.
“The way I’ve figured it, if the first part’s a location, then this could be Barnel’s compound,” I said, pausing at an entry toward the end of the first column. “But I don’t know what the numbers after that mean.”
Mae stopped and pushed her chair back from the table abruptly. “Hang on just a minute.”
Before I could argue, she was headed out of the room. I followed hurriedly, clutching my toast in one hand. When I reached her, she was sifting through some paperwork in an antique roll top desk in the parlor.
“I think I have some old files laying around from the church. Jesup didn’t know which end was up when it came to managing things, so I helped him out every so often. Just…” She abandoned the desk and dove into a two-drawer filing cabinet beside it. Eventually, she fished out a green folder from the back of the top drawer. “Here we go—I knew I had it here somewhere.”
She sat on the sofa and thumbed through the file until she’d found what she was looking for, then looked at me triumphantly. “There you go—that’s what I thought. That first bit must be a location, just like you thought. Then this bunch of numbers after it? Those are Jesup’s social security number.”
“I thought of that,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re too long, though. A social’s nine numbers, but there are thirteen listed after the coordinates.”
“I think that’s just to throw you off,” she said. “Look here—see the way it’s set up? The first five numbers are from the social, then these four numbers after it,” she circled the second four numbers in the group, 0313, “They don’t belong in here. The four numbers afterward, though… those are the last ones in Jesup’s social security number.”
“Those four numbers in the middle could be dates,” I said immediately. “March, 2013—that was when everything went to hell with Barnel.”
The rest of the numbers floated into a coherent, cohesive unit for the first time.
“They’re in chronological order,” I said, running my index finger down the page, focused now on the four numbers signifying the date in each entry. About ten entries down in the first column, I found the first date I was looking for: 1178. November, 1978: Jonestown.
I searched for August, 1990—when the Payson Church burned—and found it after only a cursory scan. Mae was right: This was what we’d been looking for.
Half an hour later, I pulled into the back entrance of Sally’s place. Einstein greeted me at the front door anxiously, tail between his legs. His side was shaved and patched, and one glance at his now-visible ribs and the droop in that usually-wagging tail reminded me that he hadn’t had the easiest time of it, either, these last few days. I knelt and ruffled his ears as he whimpered and danced and butted his head against my chest.
“It’s all right, buddy,” I said under my breath. “No hard feelings, huh?”
He licked my face and continued bumping against my legs as I straightened.
“You two kiss and make up?” Sally asked, descending the staircase.
“Yeah—sorry. I wasn’t at my best, exactly, earlier. How is she?” I asked, indicating the stairs with a nod.
“Still asleep. Not unusual—I told you, she won’t be up for another couple hours, anyway.”
“You mind if I go up now?”
“I’d mind more if you didn’t. Second door on the right. Go on.” She slapped my ass as I passed her on the stairs. “And take your dog with you—he’s been moping all day, trying to figure out what in hell’s going on.”
“You don’t think that’s a little… unhygienic?”
“Not any more than you going up there—probably less so. Just don’t jostle her too much, and let me know if she wakes up. I’ll come check on her shortly.”
I went up the stairs, my feet like lead. Einstein pushed past me when I opened the bedroom door Sally had indicated. The room was painted a robin’s egg blue, a couple of framed landscapes on the wall. Erin was cocooned in an antique canopy bed beneath a floral comforter. Stein hopped up before I could stop him, curling himself into her side. I knew she wouldn’t have it any other way, though, so I didn’t try to move him.
Instead, I just stood there for a second or two, trying to make myself move.
Erin’s already-fair complexion had gone three shades paler thanks to the blood loss. The circles under her eyes were just this side of purple. I took off my shoes. Forced myself to breathe. She was alive. Sally had said she would be all right.
She was okay.
I laid down on the side Einstein hadn’t already claimed, turned to face Solomon, and brushed the hair back from her forehead. My chest felt like it was in a vise grip, that same fear still strangling me. Beneath a flimsy hospital gown, her left side was bandaged. There was an IV in her arm connected to a bag of clear liquid hanging beside the bed. Pain meds, I hoped—though I knew she would be pissed about that. A life with addicts, first her mother and then me, had left Solomon with a deep distrust of any chemical remedy.
For a long time, I just lay on top of the blankets like that, watching her sleep. Her eyelids flickered, eyes moving back and forth through some dreamland where I couldn’t follow her. Couldn’t keep her safe.
Of course, I hadn’t been all that effective at keeping her safe in the real world, either.
I leaned in and closed my eyes, breathing her in as I pressed my lips to hers.
“Please be okay,” was the only thing I could think to say. It felt as much like a prayer as anything I’d uttered since I was a kid.
Eventually, I closed my eyes, and I slept.
Chapter Twenty-Two - Solomon
You know those scenes on TV when the hero gets shot, he gets wheeled into the ER, and in the next scene you see him creakily getting out of bed and demanding his clothes, so he can sneak out and take down the bad guys?
Yeah… I’m not that hero.
Here’s the thing no one ever mentions in those TV shows:
Getting shot hurts like hell.
I woke up with my mouth full of cotton and my head foggy, lying in a strange bed in a strange room. It was dark, the curtains drawn on two windows in the far wall. Einstein was curled up on one side of me, Diggs on the other. I shifted and pain shot through me, so i
ntense that it rocked my bones and rattled my teeth. My first thought—beyond fucking owwwww—was that time had passed. And bad things had transpired. And we had missed a pretty goddamn important meeting with the psychopath still hanging onto Kat.
I moved again, intending to try and get up, which of course woke the dog. He got to his feet with an ecstatic little whimper and started licking my face like we’d been apart for weeks.
“Stein—come on, buddy,” I croaked. “I’m okay.”
He tried to climb into my lap. I swallowed a scream as I sat up, pushing him away as gently as possible.
“Hey,” Diggs said sleepily. “Jesus, Einstein—give it a rest, would you?” He got up and set the dog on the floor, then turned on the bedside lamp. “Hang on, let me get Sally. Are you okay?”
He looked horrible—drawn and tired and terrified.
“Don’t go yet,” I said when he headed for the door. “Just… wait a second. Where are we?”
“Sally Woodruff’s,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “In Kentucky. I’m sorry—I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Where’s Dad?” No answer was needed for that one—the look on his face was more than enough to tell me something had gone wrong. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. He was gone when we woke up… Do you remember that?”
I nodded, thinking back to the cabin in the woods: waking in the dead of night to Einstein barking, darting from room to room, panicked, trying to find my father. Knowing all the while, somehow, that he wouldn’t be there. As the memories returned, my stomach got progressively heavier.
“Our stuff... Our bag was on the table. Did he...”
“He didn’t take anything,” Diggs said. “The money was all there. And I had the memory card with me, so... We have everything we started with.”
I nodded. So, my father might have abandoned us to be killed by some crazy secret agent man, but at least he hadn’t robbed us blind.
“Your father hasn’t tried to contact us,” Diggs continued. “I’m not sure where he is… I just know Willett was there when we left the cabin.”
