People in Blue Mountain have always had, as far as I could determine, a propensity for understatement. If, in fact, the Jacksons were actually gold rich, it would be the best-kept secret in the state. I had interviewed nearly everyone in town at one time or another, mining for my own kind of gold, and struck thick veins of information, stories that had lasted in oral tradition for hundreds of years. Never once had anyone mentioned or even hinted at a gold mine in our town. The so-called gold rush in Dahlonega had been short-lived and, beyond a lucky few, quite a disappointment. True enough, as I had mentioned to Andrews when we were there, tourists could still pan for gold in a Disney-style mill, and get a small vial of gold dust and sand to take home, so bits and flecks of gold were still around. But the big strikes that most people had hoped for had simply not appeared. Old-timers talked about looking in the hills in bear caves and hidden valleys, but it was idle gossip. Every once in a while someone would point out that if, after nearly two hundred years, thousands of people could still get a thimbleful of gold dust in a pan in Dahlonega, there must be a larger strain of the stuff farther up the mountains. Blue Mountain was certainly north of Dahlonega—but the entire notion was so absurdly far-fetched that I immediately began wondering why the Jacksons would foster such a conceit. I had no compulsion whatsoever to look around the cave for yellow stains.
Or was there something else hidden in the caves?
“Hovis?”
He looked up, swallowing.
“Would you mind if I explored this tunnel a bit?”
His grin got wider. “You want to see where does it come out. Sure. Fine. Go on. I’m warming up just fine right here.”
“That’s from the drink.” I started toward the opening. “It’s a false warmth.”
“Don’t you want you a lantern?” Hovis asked, holding up a box of kitchen matches he had magically produced. “Gets black as soot down there.”
“Oh.” I looked around, foolishly. “I guess that would be a good idea.”
Hovis raised his head in the direction of several carrying lanterns hanging on a nail close to the cavern opening. I fetched one and took it to Hovis, who lit it shaking his head at my witlessness.
Then, without the slightest fanfare, Hovis held up his pistol—the one I would have thought was still in my own jacket pocket.
“Thanks, by the way, for fetching this back to me.” He stared at me evenly, all smiles gone.
“How the hell did you—”
“Felt it when I bumped up against you in the truck,” he explained flatly. “When you clapped on the brakes. I pulled it out—you didn’t notice. You have no idea how years in the nuthouse can make you light-fingered. I used to poach all sorts of things in the county home. Got real good at it.”
“Be really careful,” I stammered. “I think it’s still loaded.”
“It is.” His eyes were locked on mine.
“Look, Hovis—” I began.
“You get on with your searching,” he said, though I didn’t quite understand what he meant. “I got what I need right here. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m not worried about you.”
Hovis cast a wary eye about his stronghold. “Come to think of it, maybe that boy already knew about this place. He did say something about a real good hiding place. You know how a Jackson is about a cave. Maybe I misremember.”
He took another swig. He was done with thinking.
I was not comforted by his remarks, and stared down at the lamp he’d lit. “I’ll just take this and head down the tunnel, then.”
“Don’t take too long,” he warned me. “I’ll be ready for bed by the time I get this bottle about halfway down. Hate to leave you all alone down here.”
“Be right back,” I assured him, backing away.
The thing about Hovis that made nearly everyone around him nervous was that there was no telling what was going on in his mind. Ever.
My lantern warmed, and sent a halo around me. I turned quickly and lumbered toward the darkness. Past the opening, the tunnel widened surprisingly, and the floor was well worn, easy to walk. The walls were a bit damp, but it was warmer in the rocks than I thought it should have been. Beyond the protective aura of the lamplight, the cave was invisibly black, so I moved slowly and made lots of noise. I had no intention of surprising anything else in a cave that night, and for some reason I thought a racket would keep Hovis calmer. After a bend or two, the ceiling lowered and I had to crouch a bit, uncomfortably claustrophobic. Just as I was about to decide to turn back, I thought I saw light up ahead.
I froze. I didn’t know whether to extinguish my lamp, retreat, or make a bold foray ahead. I set the lamp down on the floor, thinking I should be ready for anything. I even considered calling out to Hovis.
I stood for a few moments more, peering through the darkness toward the light, before I realized that the light was not moving and was a completely different color from my lantern.
It was, in fact, moonlight.
I sighed, glad, for some reason, that Andrews had not witnessed my timidity, and stood. A few more steps ahead assured me that I was coming to an opening. I approached it cautiously, but the cave entrance, though covered over by rampant ivy that filtered the moonlight, was empty, and the moon was doing its best to light my way. From the outside the cave was perfectly concealed; there would have been no way for a passerby to know there was a cave entrance at all.
I emerged through a curtain of ivy into a field that looked familiar. Once I got my bearings I realized I was staring down the slope toward what would eventually become my backyard. The cave had cut past all the twists and turns in the winding road from my place to the Jacksons’. What would be the subterranean variant of “as the crow flies,” I wondered. “As the mole crawls”? No matter. It was a very short cut around and down the mountain.
I turned back into the tunnel, headed for Hovis. Clever a tunnel as it was, evidence of gold was perfectly absent. Despite best efforts, my mind began creating questions. In no time I was back in the barrel room and ready to ask them. Alas—as he had on several other recent occasions—Hovis had disappeared.
I thought he must have gone back up to his shack, his cot. I blew out the lights in the cave and managed to grab my way up the hole through the trapdoor with only one lantern to guide me. Once I had achieved his kitchen area, however, I could plainly see that I was alone in the place. The mole had crawled; the crow had flown. I was standing alone in a very old shack. How and why Hovis had gotten away from me that night was a question I’d answer another day, I thought, suddenly exhausted. At that moment it seemed surpassingly sufficient that a murderer had been caught, and an innocent man had gone free—into the autumn night.
Twenty-six
Unfortunately, as Robert Burns was wont to observe, even the best-laid plans of mice and men are often wrecked by the unintentionally brutish plow of circumstance.
Despite questions about the reasons for the murder, and my missing tapes, I was so tired that, in the end, I only went to the sheriff’s office to pick up Dr. Andrews. We would both go home, drink, and fall asleep.
Unfortunately, when I pulled up in front of the place it appeared that Satan’s Dominion had, in fact, broken loose and was doing its best to take over the sheriff’s office.
Through the window I could see several deputies along with Melissa, as well as Andrews, all yelling at each other. Skidmore was on the phone and yelling louder than anyone, though I could not make out the words through the thick glass. It was a near-comic scene in its frenzy. Then I realized that the mayhem might well have been caused by something Andrews had said to Melissa, and what I couldn’t hear were actually accusations and threats mostly directed at the only one from England in the room.
Much heavy sighing and personal aggravation got me out of the truck and into the fray. I couldn’t have been gone for more than an hour, I thought. How could Andrews have caused so much fuss in so little time?
Inside, the room was impossible. Everyo
ne was at top volume, and Skidmore was bellowing into the phone. I could only understand every third word, but it didn’t take long to apprehend that Andrews was not, I thanked God, the cause of the ruckus. When Andrews saw me, he rolled his head violently and grabbed my arm.
“What the hell is—?” I began.
“He’s gone!” Andrews blared.
“Who’s gone?”
“He’s gone!” Andrews repeated, louder.
“Swear to God if you’uns don’t shut up now I’ll take out my gun and spray this whole place!” The force of Skidmore’s voice was like an explosion in the room. It left silence in its aftermath.
He saw me, pointed to Andrews, and then shook his finger violently at the door to the hallway. At first Andrews had no idea what it meant, but after a second he realized that Skid wanted us to go into the hallway so that Andrews could tell me what was going on.
Then Skidmore returned to the phone. “Okay, Donny, take it again, a little slower. You’re not in trouble—this just now happened?”
The rest was lost to me because Andrews had dragged me into the dark paneled hallway.
“That wasn’t Donny Deveroe on the phone with Skid, was it?” I asked, pointing backward to the office.
“Sh. Just listen to what happened,” he commanded.
“What, then?”
“You’re not going to believe it.” Andrews was whiter than usual, which defied the laws of physics, or at least the dictates of English pigmentation. His blond hair was more disheveled than usual. He’d obviously been raking through it with his hands.
“Go on. Tell.”
“The guy, the killer, Whatever-his-name-is Jackson—he’s gone. He got out. He escaped.” Andrews was in a weird form of shock. He was shivering, and his eyes were huge, pupils dilated.
“How is that possible?”
“No idea. Would you like to see?”
“See what?” I asked him.
“Come on.” Andrews started down the hall away from the office, toward the cells. “You have to see this.”
He opened the door at the opposite end of the hall, and I followed. All the cells were empty. He moved slowly toward one, then pointed.
I came up beside him and finally saw what he wanted me to see. In the exact center of the cot in the empty cell there was a perfectly folded Confederate uniform.
“That’s all that was left when Melissa came back here to get some fingerprints or something.” Andrews couldn’t take his eyes off the uniform. “The cell was still locked.”
“How could he have managed this?” I was a bit mesmerized myself. “And, I think I should mention: What’s he wearing? It’s kind of chilly outside.”
“Obviously he had something on under the uniform.” Andrews turned to face me. “But you haven’t heard everything yet. That was Donny Deveroe on the phone. He just now called. The corpse is missing, too!”
“The corpse?”
“The victim, the other Jackson. Gone!”
“Wait.” I was processing as fast as I could.
“Right,” Andrews confirmed before I was really finished. “The killer is gone, and the body is gone. Melissa called Skidmore—”
“Wait.” I tried again. “I thought Skidmore was here.”
“He’d gone to shake up that Millroy character,” Andrews explained, “with a fistful of forms and a relatively ugly demeanor.”
“Millroy was still in his office?”
“I think so.” Andrews wrinkled his brow. “I think that’s what Melissa said—that he’s on his way over.”
“So he was just across the street,” I said, more to myself than to Andrews.
“How does that matter?” Andrews was completely on edge. “The guy is gone and the body is gone, did you hear me say that?”
“Come on.” I headed back to the office, and the noise. Skidmore was still barking at Donny when I pushed though the door.
“He didn’t just up and disappear, Donny,” Skidmore was saying, a particular brand of rage threatening to break through the sheriff’s thin fence of reason. “Somebody came to get him.”
“I might know where he went,” I told Skidmore.
He glared at me with an intensity that would have deterred a lesser mortal.
“Fever—” he began.
“I have a really good idea, Skid.” My voice was steady, my eyes clear. “But we’d have to hurry.”
He knew I was serious; he knew I had something in mind, even if it was a hunch. He’d trusted my guesses before.
Staring at me, he spoke softly into the phone. “Good-bye, Donny.” He hung up.
Everyone else in the office followed his lead and stared at me.
“The killer is Boy Jackson,” I said calmly, “the victim’s older brother. Much as I would like to convince myself that the killer is actually Truck Jackson come back from the dead, locked in a wheel of killing and repentance, I believe I must come to the conclusion that we have all been, variously, duped by Boy Jackson. And I believe that the answers to this situation are sadly simple and base; they lead me to guess where he might be hiding right now.”
Appropriately stunned silence followed.
Skidmore glared at me long enough to melt my resolve, but I didn’t move. I really did think I knew where to find the killer.
“Most of the time,” I said softly, “I’m right about this sort of thing.”
Skidmore nodded once and said, “Let’s go.” That was the extent of his support, but the others fell in behind him as he headed out the door.
Twenty-seven
Immediately when we stepped outside, Melissa Mathews made a sound I would not have thought possible from a human being.
“Melissa?” Skidmore glared at her.
“Look!” She pointed to an empty parking place. “That’s where my squad car ought to be.”
Two seconds later it was clear how the killer had escaped.
“My keys are gone.” Her voice grated like granite rocks in a rolling barrel. She held up an empty flap on her gun belt.
“You can ride with me,” Skid said, his voice cold.
Under her breath Melissa let go a carefully constructed string of profanities that soiled half the air in Georgia. I studied her face as she said them. She was a person who blamed herself first in every situation, though it clearly wasn’t entirely her fault. I even considered that maybe Andrews had distracted her, made her nervous, thrown her off her guard.
“Come on,” Skid said in answer to her whispered tirade.
Moments later we were speeding down a dark highway toward the killer’s hiding place, toward the corpse of the victim. Andrews had agreed to ride with me in my truck. Skid and Melissa had taken one squad car; Crawdad and several other boys I didn’t know were bringing up the rear in a third vehicle.
There was a certain surge of righteous leadership in my solar plexus when we’d all piled into our various conveyances. I had certainly saved the day, I thought. It had only taken Andrews seconds to quash the sensation.
“I guess you’d better be right about this,” he said, buckling himself in. “If you’re leading us all on a fool’s chase, you’ll never live it down.”
That was enough to raise a demon of self-doubt—never far below any mask I wore.
So I turned the tables.
“You could probably figure this out yourself,” I told Andrews casually, backing the truck out onto the road. “If the killer—”
“Boy Jackson,” Andrews completed. “That’s really his name?”
“All a part of the plot.” I nodded. “If he’s carrying or somehow transporting the dead body of his brother—as he has in metaphorical ways for most of this week, you understand—he can’t possibly travel quickly. He’d want to go somewhere and hide out. So if you had to say—?”
“I guess he could be back in Red Jackson’s cave?” he answered, but he didn’t have any faith in his surmise.
“Someplace very much like it,” I assured him. “I think I’ve just recently di
scovered the perfect place.”
I roared up the back road that corkscrewed around the mountain. Mud and colored leaves sprayed behind me. The other cars kept a distance to avoid being splattered, but they were following at a good speed as well. As we rounded a particularly bumpy curve, I saw that we were near the spot I had in mind. Downward and to my left, the slope ran gently and eventually came to rest, roughly, at my back door. A bit up the slope and to the right, farther ahead, we would eventually come to the back of the Jackson place, near the spot where Skidmore had found the dead body. I was immensely relieved to see Melissa’s squad car parked there.
I slowed the truck, turned off the lights, and peered at the side of the mountain to our right. Andrews was compelled by my intensity, and did the same.
“What are we looking for?” he whispered.
“A break in the ivy,” I told him, barely audibly.
As I said it I saw the spot and stopped the truck completely. I looked back. Skid and the others had turned off their lights, too. They pulled up behind my truck as silently as they could manage. We all got out of our various rides. Skid got to my side immediately. Melissa went to her car, found the keys still in the ignition, and jerked them out with a violent gasp.
“Behind that wall of ivy somewhere over there,” I told Skidmore softly, “there’s a cave entrance that leads through a tunnel to a rock room directly underneath Hovis Daniels’s shack.”
Skidmore started to say something, stopped, bit his lower lip, and shook his head. He was realizing that the cave explained how Hovis had disappeared from him, and pulling together a few other deductions.
“He’s got liquor down there,” Skid said after a moment.
“He does. But he seems to think that the cave is actually a mining shaft.” I watched Skid to see if his face would betray any recognition of the idea. It did not.
“What kind of mining shaft?” he asked me honestly.
“Gold.”
“Oh, for Christ … you didn’t believe that.”
“I don’t,” I confessed, “but he was pretty convinced of it himself. Said that old Mr. Jackson had told him. Apparently they used to be drinking buddies.”
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