by Ninie Hammon
Nowhere USA: The Complete Series
Ninie Hammon
Copyright © 2021 by Sterling & Stone
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Contents
The Jabberwock
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Mad Dog
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Trapped
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
The Hanging Judge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
The Witch of Gideon
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Blown Away
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Nowhere People
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
C
hapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
What to read next
A Note from the Author
About the Author
Also By Ninie Hammon
Chapter One
“Hurted me,” was all Merrie said, swiping ineffectually at the gush of blood pouring down her forehead, over her eyebrow and into her left eye.
Charlie McClintock turned from the books she was stacking in a packing box, expecting a skinned knee requiring a kiss to make it better. When she saw the blood, she couldn’t help burping out a tiny scream, which, of course, let three-year-old Merrie know that the cut on her forehead was, after all, something worthy of pitching a fit over. And so she did.
Dropping dramatically to her knees, Merrie tilted her head back and began to wail, a high-pitched screech that should have etched the sound syllables into the glass in the windows. Charlie took two steps and scooped the little girl up into her arms, mumbling soothing words — “Shhh, sokay, shhhh, momma’s gotcha, shhhhh” — trying to keep the child still long enough to examine the wound.
Ordinarily, Charlene Reneé McClintock was not a woman easily rattled, but she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after last night’s freak storm and the violent fury of it left her … unsettled. It had struck without warning, no rumble of thunder to signal its approach. It hadn’t even been sprinkling when a sudden wind savagely attacked the house, tearing the front screen door off its hinges and ripping the porch swing off its chains to use as a battering ram against the wall. A strobe of lightning burned into Charlie’s retina the image of the front-yard willow tree’s branches lashing out like a cat o’ nine tails, the juniper trees cavorting like those blow-up figures you see at car dealerships and grand openings, ripped-off limbs threatening to come crashing through the windows … and then it was over.
It didn’t ratchet down in ferocity. It just … stopped. Blew through and was gone in — what? Three minutes? Five? When she’d stepped out on the porch to survey the damage, she could see stars twinkling in the velvet black sky.
A twister perhaps? How could you have a tornado without an accompanying thunderstorm? There hadn’t been a drop of rain. And the fresh, after-a-storm smell in the air … it wasn’t there. She smelled only the honeysuckle around the porch. She’d been in a hurricane once in South Florida and it had been no more ferocious. That’d make the record books: The Appalachian Hurricane of June 1995.
It wasn’t just the ferocity of the storm, though. It was the sound it’d made. The wind had … wailed. Sounded like crying children … or lost souls in hell. Now, maybe that was the normal sound of a hurricane in the mountains — hard to know a thing like that when there was no such thing as a mountain hurricane. But perhaps last night’s storm was holding up for Charlie McClintock’s inspection the outside edges of “no such thing.”
Who knew?
Well, what she did know was that the cut on Meredith’s forehead, far from as life-threatening as the amount of blood would seem to indicate, did need a couple of stitches. And unless Charlie wanted the little girl to carry for the rest of her life a permanent reminder on her forehead of tripping over a storm-tossed tree branch in her grandmother’s driveway, the sewing should be done by a plastic surgeon. That certainly wasn’t going to happen if she took Merrie to the emergency room at the Beaufort County Hospital in Carlisle.
But where else could she go?
She couldn’t haul a screaming three-year-old all the way to Lexington! And Nower County, Kentucky had no hospital.
Nower County, Kentucky had no … anything.
Charlie was facing a half hour’s drive through the mountains with a bleeding, shrieking toddler strapped into a car seat behind her.
Goody.
Chapter Two
Viola Tackett’s teeth clacked together when the old pickup truck slammed down into a hole big as a soup pot in the logging road and she made herself a promise: I ain’t doing this no more.
She hadn’t ought to be doing it now, but until she was lead-pipe certain that Neb, Obie, and Zach knew what they was doing, she didn’t dare leave it to them without her coming along behind to check. Shoot, them boys was forty years old. You’d think they could handle a little thing like planting marijuana seedlings with a tobacco setter. But wasn’t none of the three smart enough to pour sand out of a boot if the instructions was on the heel, so here she was bouncing around in the old truck on the way for a surprise inspection.
She come around a bend and slammed on the brakes — had to push the pedal all the way to the floor because them brake pads was flat as week-old roadkill. Barely got stopped before she ran right into the tree lying across the road, so big it must have been a sapling when Abraham Lincoln was a pup over in LaRue County a century and a half ago. Okay, maybe that was a stretch, but she couldn’t imagine how it had stood as long as it had, big as it was. The fierce winds of last night’s storm must have took it out.
It’d been a storm unlike any Viola’d seen in near seventy years drawing breath at the good Lord’s pleasure on this earth where he put her. The wind was the thing. She had a log cabin sat snug as a dung beetle in a cow patty, had been built by her granddaddy back before the First World War. She’d been born there, would likely die there and had birthed her children, the five that’d lived and the three that hadn’t — all except the twins she sent back to the devil — in the same bed where they’d been conceived.
But even snug as it was, the wind last night was peculiar. Wasn’t like no ordinary wind, and she told Neb, who’d got drunk and missed the whole thing, that it sounded like it was … crying, had a sound like a baby wailing off in the trees, like to broke Viola’s heart.
And wasn’t much in life broke Viola Tackett’s heart.
She had to throw her shoulder against the pickup truck door twice ‘fore it’d open. Latch was broke and she supposed not being able to open the door was a sight better than not being able to close it. She walked around to the front of the truck to have a look-see at the downed tree but it was a waste of time. Wasn’t no way she’d ever be able to move it, not even if she tied a chain to it and pulled it with the truck. She’d send the boys out here with chainsaws to clear the road soon’s they got back to the house. But that was then and this was now. She sighed.
Wasn’t nothin’ for it but to take the branch road that went up over Bent Stick Ridge. It was ten miles out of the way if it was a foot, wound all the way into Drayton County and back into Nower County, but wasn’t nothing else she could do ‘less she wanted to turn her flat butt around and haul it back to the house and that wasn’t gonna happen.
Viola climbed back up into her truck and eased the old thing into reverse. You had to hold your mouth just right to get it into and out of gears. Transmission was shot. But the old truck was like an old dog and she wasn’t ready yet to put it down, even if it was held together with Bondo and duct tape.
