Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  “Then where is she?” Sam said, sensing there was more that Malachi wasn’t saying. “What is it — tell me.”

  “I left my rifle, the one I was squirrel hunting with, behind the door in E.J.’s waiting room. She saw me put it there when we were loading up the van. Now, it’s gone.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sam was totally flummoxed. ‘You’re saying this bleeding stroke victim went in there and stole your gun and … what? What for?”

  Thelma spoke then. Her voice was soft, not trying to be quiet but because she didn’t have enough air to speak any louder.

  “She was babbling about ‘the witch from out there on the flat.’ Most of what she said made absolutely no sense — about a monster with flaming eyes that smelled like dead bodies all mixed up with words and phrases from the Jabberwock poem.”

  “Don’t know how she could have knowed them kind of words,” Roscoe interrupted.

  Malachi silenced him. “Fish was quoting the poem in the van. Go on, Thelma.”

  “She said the Jabberwock was the witch’s fault because it had come to play with her and the others and it would stay until it got what it wanted. And, of course a witch would have a sword, a vorpal sword — crazy nonsense like that.”

  “Brain damage,” Sam whispered.

  “She said she was going to force the witch to use the sword to cut off the Jabberwock’s head, kill it so she could go see her boy.”

  Thelma’s voice was soft but the words were as powerful as a shout. “She said she was going to kill the witch if she refused.”

  Sam’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “Charlie!”

  They turned in unison to look at Little Bear Mountain. Charlie’s mother’s house was on the other side.

  “She couldn’t possibly climb …” Sam began but couldn’t finish. Took a breath and tried again. “It’s two miles if it’s a foot, up the side of a mountain, through the bushes, over limbs and dead trees and then back down the other side. In the dark — without a flashlight.”

  “She’s got a flashlight,” Fish said. Fish had been in the background of everything that had been going on all day, couldn’t “get a ride home” because he didn’t have one. He had disappeared into the back of the Dollar General Store late in the afternoon and when Sam went to the back to get more paper towels, she smelled something like cherries. Cough syrup. Fish was curled up in a corner with a bottle, had gotten his alcohol where he could.

  “I made myself a place on the floor in the back of the store and she came in the back door. So she must have gone out E.J.’s back door and come around. I asked if I could help …”

  He shook his head.

  “I shouldn’t have done that because I scared her, jumping out at her like I did. She cried out something, sounded like ‘Bandersnatch!’ and raised the rifle, pointed it right at me. I backed off, said I just wanted to help, that’s all. She said she didn’t need my help, then she dug around until she found a flashlight, one of the big ones with the two C batteries. She took it and the gun and went back out the way she came in.”

  “We need to call Charlie, warn her,” Sam said. “Tell her to lock her doors and stay inside, not open a door for anybody.”

  “Thelma, you do that,” Malachi said. He looked at Sam. “Can I borrow …?”

  “No, I’m driving.” Sam slid back behind the wheel and Malachi got in beside her.

  “Keep trying until she answers,” he called out to Thelma as Sam pulled out of the parking lot. “Keep calling. Tell her to run, to hide.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Charlie stood in the darkness just inside the door after Sam dropped her off, just stood there. Then realized Sam wouldn’t leave until she saw a light, so she flipped the switch. Still she stood, listening to the crunch of tires as Sam pulled out of the driveway and drove away, almost not feeling the weight of Merrie, dead to the world in her arms.

  She waited for a few seconds, long enough for Sam to get far enough away from the house that she couldn’t see, then she reached over and flipped the lights back off so she could stand there in the dark, listening to the sound of silence roaring in her ears.

  She and Sam had said almost nothing to each other during the ride to Charlie’s mother’s house. Both just stared out the windshield, their own thoughts imprisoning them in their own worlds, which right now were two fenced-in yards next door to each other. Each contained their own stuff that they weren’t ready yet to share, and each too full of their own stuff to have room for anybody else’s.

  This was crazy. It couldn’t be happening. It didn’t happen. This was all an illusion or a hallucination or a dream she was going to wake up from, feeling Merrie’s wet kisses on her cheek and probably cry from relief that the nightmare was over.

  Twilight Zone stuff like this didn’t happen to normal people. No, not normal people. Her mother’d always pointed out that “normal is just a setting on a dryer.” Ordinary, then. Ordinary people did not fly out into nowhere and get transported—

  The word “transported” brought a burp of sound, maybe stifled laughter, some sound that bespoke the absurdity of it all.

  She was Charlene Renee Ryan McClintock, thirty-two years old, with a birthmark shaped like a smiley face on her tush, a cesarean section scar on her belly where doctors had intervened after nineteen hours of unproductive labor and saved her little girl’s life. She had a dentist appointment next week to replace the filling that’d come out when she bit into a piece of chocolate pie — a piece of pie, for crying out loud — and if she didn’t return The Lion King to Blockbuster by five o’clock on Monday, she’d be charged a late fee, which she knew was how they made their money — late fees. And she hadn’t even watched it yet. It had sounded like something Merrie would love, an animated musical about a lion—

  Her mind was ping-ponging. Frantically racing from one inane thought to another so she wouldn’t have to think about—

  She let out what sounded like one of Merrie-the-Drama-Queen’s theatrical sighs. And when she drew the breath back in, there was just a whiff of … vomit.

  And the whole thing slammed down around her with the clanging of the cell door in the execution chamber of a prison.

  She started across the dark room toward the hallway that led to the bedroom that’d been hers when she was a little girl. That was where Merrie was sleeping. It wasn’t the smell of vomit. She was imagining that part even if the rest of it was real. She’d stripped Merrie down to her birthday suit and dressed her in new clothes at the Dollar Store — underwear, socks, shoes, everything — even though she had only been in the presence of the yuk, not dealing directly with it like the rest of them had. And she’d thrown away what the little girl’d had on, a pair of jeans and a Whitney Houston tee shirt, stained with the blood from her head wound. Charlie had loved the cute outfit — but not enough to wash it. Charlie was on her third, maybe her fourth set of scrubs, having tossed her own clothing, including — especially — her shoes, when they’d gotten too gross. In the spill of light from Sam’s headlights when Charlie’d crossed in front of the car, she’d noticed that the scrub shirt had a pattern of some kind — little balloons or flowers or maybe smiley faces. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d grabbed a random shirt off a hanger on a rack between the posts with M’s on them. A popcorn synapse fired. She wouldn’t let Sam pay for all the stuff they’d used today — likely every set of hospital scrubs, which would fit anybody, in the building and an uncountable number of towels and washcloths. The real hero of today’s catastrophe would be whoever volunteered to wash all the dirty stuff … if anybody did. Probably best to take it out into the parking lot and burn it. Lunch and dinner, too, what little their unsettled stomachs would tolerate — peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Vienna sausage, chips and, of course, Ding Dongs, HoHo’s, Moon Pies and soft drinks. And paper goods — paper towels and paper cups and bottled water and … the list was huge. Everybody’d just taken what they needed. That was going to be quite a bill …
but that was a thought for another day.

  “Ouch!” she cried, hopping around on one foot after she banged her shin painfully on the coffee table.

  There was a full moon but the curtains were drawn so she might as well have been in an oil drum, and she wasn’t familiar enough with the current placement of the current furniture in her mother’s house to negotiate a trip across the living room in the dark. She should have left the light on.

  Making it to the hallway without further mishap, she felt along the wall for the light switch and turned it on, went all the way to the end, carrying Merrie into the bedroom on the front of the house she’d inherited years ago from her older sister, Mallory. Who’d married that idiot who fancied himself a boat captain and they’d taken Mama out—

  Nope, not there, either.

  The room had been redecorated … no that was too formal a term. Over the years, it had gradually been un-Charlied. The bed was the same — a huge four-poster oak cannonball that was so high off the floor her mother’d always been paranoid one of the girls would fall off and break her neck. And Charlie’s old, threadbare bedspread and bed skirt remained — though they should have been replaced with the curtains and the wall art. Most people who knew Charlie now would have trouble believing it, but she had been a very “girly” little girl — all about ribbons and bows and pretty dresses and always, always, always anything ballerina. Her bedroom walls had been covered with ballerina art. The bedspread was a soft, pale pink chenille, and the bed skirt that stretched from the mattress to the floor was made of poufy pink organza, three stiff layers of it sticking out like the bed was dressed in a ballerina skirt.

  Laying Merrie down on the bed, she flicked on the bedside lamp and started to undress her, then changed her mind. She untied her shoelaces and removed her new shoes. The kid could sleep in her clothes. They were clean. She didn’t even pull down the sheets. She just picked up the Cracker Barrel quilt her mother’d bought with a tag that claimed it was handmade and maybe it had been, and snuggled the child up under it. Then she went to the window, unhooked the latch and raised it a couple of inches to let the room air out. It was stuffy. The house had been closed up when she’d arrived and it still smelled musty. She’d been systematically going from one room to the next boxing up anything that mattered, that she or Mallory might want to keep. She’d let the real estate agency handle everything else. She had planned to be finished in time to get the rental car back to the agency by five o’clock even though her flight wasn’t until nine.

  The best laid plans of mice and men …

  She paused before she turned off the light, looking down at the sleeping child. Oh, to be able to turn the world off so completely like Merrie could!

  Charlie didn’t like admitting it, but with the wash of light and shadow over her face and the black curls, Merrie McClintock bore a striking resemblance to her father. She was biracial and that’d be an issue for her as she got older — though that kind of bigotry was blessedly fading out of American society. It wasn’t that Charlie wanted to deny Merrie’s African-American heritage. She would always help the child celebrate that. She just didn’t like being reminded of the handsome ex-football player who had charmed her, swept her off her feet and then—

  Why was her mind going to all the places Where the Wild Things Are tonight? Maybe because her synapses were so fried that her automatic barriers had short-circuited and were down and all the stray cattle were now wandering out into the road.

  She leaned over and planted a kiss on Merrie’s plump cheek, then switched off the light, plunging the room into darkness before she closed the door. Since she never woke up in the middle of the night, Merrie did not require a nightlight.

  Once Charlie had Merrie in bed, her sense of purpose left her and she stood in the hallway trying to think what she ought to do. A fog rolled in off the sea into her mind and nothing was distinct anymore. Everything had bright haloes and soft edges. Well, one thing she ought to do was call the rental agency at the airport and tell them their vehicle would not be returning as per their prearranged agreement. She picked up the receiver off the wall phone in the hallway before it occurred to her that she didn’t know the number. It was printed on both the yellow and pink copies of the car rental agreement … which she had stuffed into the glove box of the car … which was … where? Somewhere. Everything had to be somewhere.

  She didn’t have the phone number of the reservations department of American Airlines memorized either. It was on her plane ticket, which was in her purse, which was …

  Yeah, that.

  She replaced the receiver heavily. What was she thinking? Clearly, nothing at all. How many people had tried to call “out” somewhere outside Nowhere County today? Every one of them encountered the same phenomenon. The phone never rang on the other end, but there was no busy signal either. The phone just went dead, like somebody’d snipped the wires. And somebody had. Something. The Jabberwock.

  Going down the hallway to the “guest” bedroom on the back of the house, she flipped on the light and flounced in exaggerated fatigue, spread-eagled on the quilted bedspread, which might also have come from Cracker Barrel. She lay there as she’d fallen, feeling her exhausted muscles begin to relax, and considered following Merrie’s lead. Just kick off her shoes and pull the bedspread over her. After all, her clothes were as clean as Merrie’s.

  But she wasn’t clean. Didn’t feel clean, at least. In fact, as soon as she thought about it she considered that maybe she had smelled vomit after all — on her body, her skin or … oh, gross, her hair.

  She practically leapt up off the bed and went to the bathroom — the hall bath with its charming antique fixtures, not the one off her bedroom with a shower. She didn’t want a shower; she wanted a bath!

  The clawfoot bathtub was so big you had to drain the whole hot water heater to fill it to the top. Fine. That was just dandy. Charlie turned on the water, both handles, hot and cold, looked around, found a bottle of bubble bath and poured a more than generous portion into the water. The flower smell filled the room and Charlie inhaled it deeply. For some reason, the smell made her want to cry.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sam took the corner too fast and swerved into the oncoming lane, but she knew it was empty. If you were going to drive recklessly, too fast, suicidal fast, the mountains were the place to do it because you could see approaching headlights around corners and on the other sides of hills.

  She didn’t even glance at Malachi, sitting tense beside her, but knew he had to be concerned about their speed.

  “I’m a good driver,” she said without looking at him, regretting the words as soon as they left her mouth. What an absurd thing to say. Like he would believe her. Like it mattered.

  They had to get to Charlie’s before …

  “You don’t really think …?”

  She let the question dangle, but he didn’t answer it so she completed it. “You don’t think Abby would actually … do something, do you?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Her eyes snapped to him for a moment and then back to the road. The certainty of that statement.

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Because her mind is … because she’s had a stroke. Maybe it’s a stroke, but something’s definitely screwed up in her head and I am here to testify that when something’s screwed up in your head, there is absolutely nothing you won’t do.” Then he whispered softly, probably wasn’t aware that he was speaking. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “But how could she possibly climb that mountain in the shape she’s—”

  “She could climb it.”

  She shot him a glance and he was looking at her now. “Same reason. You can do just about anything if you have to.”

  “Merrie … she’s just a baby. Abby’s a sweet kid and she wouldn’t hurt …”

  She looked at him and saw the same answer written on his face. The car fell silent. Sam could hear her own breathing sounding ragged in her throat and the poundi
ng of her heart was surely hammering so fast each beat was visible on the front of her shirt.

  “You were good out there today,” he said.

  She shot him a more-than-a-second look, then back to the road.

  “You stepped up and … we called it ‘doing the necessary.’ Means what it sounds. But not everybody’s willing to do the necessary. You were.”

  “I wanted to become a doctor.”

  Where did that come from? Why in the world would she say a thing … because it was true. She had wanted to be a doctor ever since she was a little girl. She was always taking the temperature of the baby dolls she and Charlie played with at recess every day. Bandaging their broken arms and legs, without giving a whole lot of thought, of course, to how a six-month-old infant had broken both arms and both legs.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t.” She felt the need to go on. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like people are always saying, ‘I was always going to write a book someday.’ I really would have—”

  “I’m sure you really would have. But a coal miner’s daughter …”

  “Not so much.”

  “You’d have been a good one.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that so she didn’t say anything at all.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here now. Folks are going to need you.”

  That somehow had a sinister sound.

  ‘You don’t really think this thing—” she didn’t like the word Jabberwock, but it did seem appropriate -- “this Jabberwock thing is going to stay here.”

  “And you don’t?”

  It never failed. It was one of the great cosmic truths of life. As soon as you got into a bathtub, the phone rang.

  That was the phone ringing, right? The bathwater was running, making so much noise Charlie couldn’t be sure. Maybe it wasn’t the phone. And if it was, they’d call back if it was important. Right now, Charlie had no intention of getting out of the tub and tippy-toeing little puddles down the hallway to answer it.