by Billy Coffey
The sun had yet to rise over the mountains on that last morning when John David reported for work at Bucky’s door and the pastor knocked at Wilson’s. I guess it all come down to father and son that day, though neither knew it.
Angela had coffee ready, as did Scarlett. John David told Bucky they should spend their first (and only, as it would happen) day as partners calming people’s fears and poking around for anything on Ruth’s killer. It’d been an accident is what John David said. Had to be, Ruth being shot like that. Somebody got spooked, and now whoever’d done it was too scared to come forward. Bucky thought on that as Cordelia waited by the window for Hays. She’d texted him earlier, saying she had to talk about things. She told her parents they were going up to the grocery to help clean things up. Course, that was a lie.
At the mayor’s kitchen table across town, the Reverend told Wilson that Ruth’s death hadn’t been an accident at all. It was vengeance, nothing more, and it could’ve just as easy been either of them who ended up dead on the church steps. My, but that was an argument. David saying all this had to stop and the mayor asking how, each of them blaming the other for the mess everybody’d found themselves in, and you can bet Scarlett heard most of it even if the mayor had sent her to her room. About the only thing Crow Holler’s most important citizens agreed upon was just that—they were needed now, more than ever, and so their secret had to stand. And they agreed on this one other thing: More people would die unless they did something. Alvaretta would see to it. What they needed, the Reverend said, was an end. What they needed was Alvaretta’s spy. Get him, and you’ll get the witch.
Wilson said that all sounded well and good, but didn’t nobody know who Alvaretta’s spy was. That’s when David reached into his pocket and pulled out the slips of paper Angela had given him before revival the night before.
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I know where to start.”
-2-
By the time they got to the council building that morning, John David had almost convinced Bucky his view of things was right. Granted, that sounded a whole lot more appealing to the sheriff than the alternative. Sure, it could’ve been an accident. People were shooting at everything that moved the night before. Who’s to say Ruth Mitchell wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time? But there was one problem with all that: it didn’t explain all them footprints. Try as he could, John David didn’t have an answer to that.
Bucky pulled on the doors to the council building and found them locked. He knocked until he saw Scarlett looking out from the window in Wilson’s office. She met them out front and then locked the door behind them. The piece of paper on her pad was already filled out, like she’d expected them:
Daddy says nobody else can come in until you find out who killed Ruth.
“Your daddy scared?” John David asked.
She flipped the page over to reveal more words. Bucky smiled. Scarlett was a bright one.
He said Stu is coming for us next. Something’s wrong with him. I don’t know what. The Reverend and him had a fight this morning. He’s as scared as Daddy is.
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bucky said. “John David’s got an idea on what happened last night. Makes some sense.”
Scarlett led them down the hall to the mayor’s office. She stopped at the closed door and raised a finger like she was telling them to either be quiet or be careful.
Bucky knocked and opened the door. John David followed him inside. The shades were drawn tight, all the lights off. You could barely see Wilson’s shape in the chair behind the desk. A pistol rested on the blotter.
“What you doing sitting in the dark, Wilson?” Bucky asked.
The mayor spoke, but only to his daughter: “Scarlett, why don’t you go check the doors one more time. I gotta have a talk with our sheriff and constable.”
Scarlett went out but didn’t bother checking the locks. She leaned against the wall and kept her ear close to the door, listening.
“Took everything I had to come in this place today,” Wilson said. “But I’m here. Town needs me. Especially after Ruth.”
“About that,” Bucky said. His foot got to jumping up and down, nervous. “John David thinks . . . Wilson, can I turn on some lights? I can barely see you.”
“Leave them off.”
Bucky rolled his eyes. “Okay. John David thinks what happened to Ruth was an accident.”
“You see them tracks all over town, John David?”
“I did,” John David said. “But that’s got nothing to do with what happened to Ruth, unless whatever made them prints can pull a trigger.”
“You forget Alvaretta has aid.”
“I haven’t. But why shoot Ruth? She was just a kid when Stu died.”
“Ruth wasn’t the target. I was.”
Bucky’s foot stilled. “You, Wilson? Why’d Alvaretta want you?”
“That don’t matter, Buck. You don’t need to know that. But I need to know something. I need to know why you’re keeping things from me.” He slid the papers the Reverend had given him across the desk. “You got a list of suspects you don’t bother to let me know about? I gotta get it from David, who got it handed to him by Angela?”
Bucky stared at the names. “They ain’t suspects, Wilson. That’s just gossip.”
“Gossip’s all we got, and it’s as good a place to start as any. Reverend agrees, even though he said Belle liked to pitch a fit over it. I need y’all to go bring these people in for questioning.”
John David picked up the papers and read off the names. “Hays? Medric? The doc? Chessie? Wilson, we’ve known these people our whole life.”
“Maybe,” Wilson said. “Or maybe we just thought we did. Never did like Hays Foster. That boy’s about two fries short of an order, and we all know it. I know how things are with him and Cordelia, Bucky. How she . . . is. But I need him down here. We all know Medric’s hiding something too. He’s acted funny ever since he come up to the hospital. And don’t nobody know where he was last night.”
“He was with me,” Bucky said. “He was out there looking for Stu with me.”
“I need him to answer some questions. The doc too.”
John David started laughing. “He’s your brother-in-law, Wilson. You can’t think he’d have anything to do with this.”
“He’s also the only one determined to convince everybody ain’t nothing wrong with our girls but some loose wiring in their heads, and that’s a lie. Danny Sullivan never cared to fit in with this town, never bothered to learn our ways. He don’t even come to church half the time.”
“I don’t either,” John David said. “You gonna question me too?”
“I do got a couple for you, as a matter of fact. You know anything of Chessie’s involvement with the Circle?”
Bucky looked like he’d just been punched. “The Circle? Wilson, ain’t been Klan round here since before we was born.”
Wilson didn’t take his eyes off John David. “Well?”
“You’re out of your mind,” John David said.
“No, I think I’m thinking more clear than I have in a long while, son. Chessie’s been trying to take this town over for her own use for years, and the only person between her and what she wants is me. Why not use Alvaretta? Why not get help from the one person who’d love to see us all burn? And why not fix everything up nice and pretty so Bucky’d have no other choice but ask you to be our new constable?”
John David shook his head. “I’m not doing this.”
“You will, or I’ll call down to Mattingly and get Sheriff Barnett up here. I’ll make sure you get locked away for so long you’ll forget what the sun looks like. One call’s all I need, boy. I’ll tell him I saw you put two barrels into Ruth Mitchell’s chest myself. I don’t care what your momma’ll say, and I don’t care about Chessie Hodge none either. This here’s bigger than you. Bigger than all of us.”
“You wouldn’t do that, Wilson,” Bucky said.
“You think I won’t? I made you the law
here, Buck. I can take that away. Time’s come to make the hard choices, and that’s what I’m doing.” He pointed to the papers in John David’s hand. “I want them people in here today. I’ll extend charity enough that it’ll be you two who brings them in instead of a lynch mob, but I don’t trust them. I’m getting Raleigh to set up roadblocks in case one of them gets word and decides to run. Either way, they’ll all stand in church tonight and give an account. It’s time we get some answers.”
-3-
Scarlett listened till she’d heard her father’s list of suspects, then she walked as fast and quiet as she could away from the mayor’s shut door, taking the phone from her pocket. She might’ve no longer been master of her tongue, but her fingers were still her own.
I don’t know if that girl even suspected what had gone wrong inside her father. More likely, she thought what had overcome the mayor was nothing short of a furtherance of the very curse she herself was responsible for unleashing on our town. That being the case, Scarlett shouldered the burden of trying to make things right again. And that wouldn’t start with allowing Bucky and John David to bring in Medric and Chessie and even Hays, whom Scarlett had never liked. No, it would start another way.
She’d already lost so much, and if her daddy didn’t stop what he meant to do, Scarlett would lose the little she had left. It had been a hard thing, losing her momma. It was hard still. Not just on Scarlett and not just on Wilson, but on them both together. Tonya Bickford had always been the soft middle between her equally hard husband and daughter, keeping them from scraping against each other and sparking a fire. There had been a time not long after she died that Scarlett had prayed God would bring her momma back and take her daddy instead. But Scarlett loved him, she truly did, and she’d never once set out to undo something her daddy had done. Not ever, until now.
Because the evil didn’t lay in town, like her daddy and the Reverend believed. The evil lay on the mountain. It lay with the witch.
Scarlett reached the glass door her father had warned her to keep locked and scrolled through her phone for the numbers she needed. She paused on Medric’s (thinking, no doubt, of all those crow feathers Hays had seen stuck to the undertaker’s boots) and then pressed his name as well. To her, it must’ve felt the same as shielding Tully Wiseman’s bare hand with her own.
The text she sent contained only four words:
GET OUT THEIR COMING!!!
-4-
I don’t know how it was that Hays and Cordelia found themselves in bed together that morning, other than what I already told you: Hays didn’t have nobody left, and Cordy was hoping to fill up on what small bit of love remained in him before telling him of their child.
As it happened, there had been no act. Them two only laid against each other, and that seemed enough for them both. I think it was a way for Hays to feel close to somebody and a way for Cordelia to hang on to a thread of something that once might have felt Supposed to Be but had increasingly become a Never Would. Hays had changed. Everyone had, really—another tentacle of Alvaretta’s curse. It was as though the whole of Crow Holler had discovered things long buried somewhere inside them. Some, like her father, had found a kind of strength there. Others, like her momma, had uncovered a kind of darkness. And a few, like Hays, had seemed to find both and neither.
No talk of love or the future passed between them, nor did Hays tell Cordy of the way he’d seen Medric’s face the night before. To tell her of that would be to place them both in danger. Cordelia would no doubt tell Bucky, and Bucky would go after Medric to the sheriff’s own end. No, Hays would have to take care of Medric himself. He would have to find another way, because Medric was a monster and the monsters had to die.
Cordy’s stomach pressed into his side. He flinched when he felt a tear settle on his neck.
“I need to tell you thumthing, Hayth. About uth.”
“What about us?”
Another tear. “I’m pwegnant.”
Hays spun in the bed, knocking Cordelia in the stomach with his knee. She made a clogged little oomph! sound that looked to scare them both equally. Both of her eyes were stained with tears. He saw a thin runner of snot leaking out from the nostril she couldn’t feel.
“You’re what?” he said.
That only made Cordelia cry harder.
“You can’t be pregnant. Cordy? Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“No,” he said. “No, don’t you tell me that. How could you do that to me?”
Cordelia shrank back, pulling the covers up. “How cud . . . ?”
“Does anybody know? Do your parents know?”
“Yeth.”
The blood drained from Hays’s face. “This can’t be happening.” He shook his head. “This can’t be happening, Cordelia. No. Nonononono. This can’t be happening.”
“Hayth—”
Sitting up now, his legs tight against his chest and his hands to his knees, rocking slow like he’d fallen into some kind of trance, repeating those same words over and over—Nonononono.
But yesyesyesyesyes, friend.
I do believe that boy had settled on the idea that in a week full of bad moments, this one was worst. There’d be no escaping Hays’s future now, that other curse he’d always kept in his head of produce prices and Tuesday specials. Coming home to a wife and a kid. Picking the grocery over the family, just like his own father had done.
Nonononono.
“Hayth, I’m thorry.”
Sorry! Sorry, friend! Well, that would just fix everything now, wouldn’t it? Yessir, that would set it all back to square one, all the way to that night in the back of the Camaro, when the very same Please and I want to that had once come out of Angela’s mouth had come out of her daughter’s. But instead of that, it would now be We shouldn’t and Let’s wait all because Cordelia was Sorry.
“This is it,” Hays said. “This is my end.”
But it wasn’t, friend. Not yet. Because right then, his cell phone chirped.
Hays reached for it even as Cordelia told him no, they had to talk about this, what was going to happen next. He didn’t hear her as he read what Scarlett had sent him. He didn’t hear anything. The world had fallen away.
He scrambled from the bed, reaching for his jeans and shirt, reaching for his shoes as a knot of panic inside Cordelia began to grow and harden like the baby in her womb.
“I got to get out,” he said.
“Vhat?”
“I have to get out,” he said again. “They’re almost here. Scarlett found out. I don’t know how, but she did.”
He scrambled for his keys as Cordelia began to scream, wanting to know what was happening, wanting to talk about the baby, Hays screaming back The baby, the baby, I wish that baby was dead. He left her in a ball on the bed but found care enough to beg Cordy to go home. Go find Bucky. Tell them they were coming—the monsters. They were coming for us all.
-5-
Hays wasn’t the only one who had it in his mind to get out the Holler right then. By the time he’d found the keys to the Camaro and backed it out of the garage, Medric had already gone from the funeral home.
He’d taken nothing but the clothes he wore. He’d watched Bucky and John David walk into the council building that morning, seen the way they’d stood there staring at the funeral home. And then came Scarlett’s text. They’d come for him first, and for no other reason than the color of Medric’s skin and the goodness of his heart.
The only reason he’d slipped past Bucky at all was John David had tried talking sense to Wilson. Now Medric barreled past the very spot you’re parked now, friend, and he had the fear of the devil in his eyes.
Flying now, bringing his old car up to fifty on the potted dirt road that runs on down past where the Reverend had seen Stu Graves, blowing by the clinic in a blur. Aiming for the edge of town and freedom—freedom finally—from all he’d done. Looking on past the blue mountains that rose around him on all sides. Thinking of Richmond. That’s where he’d
go. He had kin there, and they wouldn’t know what he’d done. He could start over. Do anything besides tend to the dead.
And he almost made it, friend. But as he rounded the last turn and neared the flat spot where Bucky had caught John David the night before, he saw ahead the two trucks set up in the road not a mile on. Four men, all armed. Medric couldn’t tell their faces, but he didn’t need to. The only thing he could do was stop before they saw him and make a slow drive back to town.
-6-
He got as far as the town line. That’s where Hays found Raleigh Jennings waiting with a shotgun and a box full of shells, standing in front of the Cadillac he’d parked sideways in the road. Raleigh’d known it was Hays long before Hays even seen him. It was the Camaro, you see. That car sounded like nothing else in town.
Wilson had called early that morning after his meeting with the pastor. Told Raleigh to get some men together and block Crow Holler off, and then he read off a list of people to watch for especially. Troublemakers all, that’s what Raleigh said as he wrote down those names. Wilson agreed, then asked Raleigh if that was something he could handle. Raleigh said it would be no problem, he knew just the men to call for help.
The rest of the Circle were now scattered along the other roads leading to either Mattingly or the deep woods. Good men who knew how to protect a town.
Hays didn’t slow.
Raleigh tried waving. When that didn’t work, he racked his shotgun and leveled it at the windshield. That would be the boy’s only warning. Twenty more yards, he’d get a face full of buckshot.
Hays hit the brakes, nearly losing the Camaro’s back end in the process. He fishtailed on the dirt and nearly went sideways before finally gaining control, stopping in a cloud of dust barely beyond the scatter-gun’s reach.
Raleigh stepped forward to close the gap and yelled, “Out the car.”
Hays opened the Camaro’s door. He eased out with his hands high. What little color that boy kept in his face was gone. His arms shook like they each weighed more than the world.
