by Noah Bly
Elijah’s chin trembled a little but his voice stayed even. “I know.” He looked over at the dark staircase ascending to the second floor. “What do you think happened to his wife?”
Jon shook his head. “Dunno.”
The possibility that yet another dead body was in the building with them was too much for both boys; neither could bear to dwell on it. Jon glanced at Elijah and purposely changed the subject, remembering something else. “What got into you tonight?”
Elijah frowned. “What do you mean?”
“When you started screaming all that stuff at Boner.”
Elijah shrugged. “I just got mad, I guess.” He stared at the rear wall of the cell; the bullet that had pierced Jon’s shoulder had left a gruesome smattering of red dots that reminded him of a Rorschach test. “He was really hurting you, and I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Jon studied Elijah’s face. He had the feeling this was not the sort of thing Elijah would ever dream of saying to anybody else, and the offhanded honesty of it moved him.
“Well, you definitely got his attention, man,” he said. He paused for a moment and the corners of his mouth quirked up. “Especially when you started in on his mom.”
Elijah grinned back at him, flushing. “Yeah.” He glanced over at Bonnor again. “I almost peed my pants when he started coming after me instead of you.”
“I thought you’d gone nuts.” Jon shook his head. “Seriously. I thought you and Julianna were twins, or something.”
Elijah giggled. “You were just as bad, man,” he retorted. Elijah had never called anybody “man” in his life, but Jon’s speech patterns were beginning to rub off on him. “You were the one who called him ‘Buttlick Turdmunch,’ remember?”
“No shit?” Jon scratched at the stubble on his face, leaving a dab of blood on his chin. “I was too scared to know what I was saying.” He paused and laughed aloud. “I guess maybe that explains why he got so pissed at me.”
“Yeah,” Elijah agreed, chortling. “I don’t think he liked you very much.”
Their laughter had a touch of hysteria in it and they both sobered at once. Even if the body at the base of the stairwell hadn’t been there to reproach them, everything else that had happened in the past two days would have been enough to stifle their levity—the trooper Julianna had run over, Bebe Stockton’s accidental death, the burning of the dairy farmhouse, Bonnor Tucker’s cruelty. There wasn’t much to laugh about, and they both knew it.
Elijah peeked down at Jon’s injuries but quickly looked away, his stomach lurching at the sight of all the blood on his hands.
You better get used to it, Elijah told himself bitterly. He couldn’t believe he’d almost forgotten his role in Bebe Stockton’s death the previous day. Who else was going to get killed before this was all over?
“What are we going to do?” Jon muttered, wincing as Elijah applied more pressure to his wounds. “After we get out of here, I mean?”
The combination of blood and sweat was making Jon’s skin slick, and Elijah was finding it difficult to maintain his grip. He apologized as he shifted his hands again, then he pondered the older boy’s question. He sensed Jon would want to get as far away as possible from the jailhouse, and he sighed before answering, anticipating an argument.
“I think we should help Julianna get where she needs to go,” he said at last.
Jon looked at him blankly. “To Pawnee, you mean?” He raised his eyebrows. “You are crazy, Elijah. You know that, right? I doubt the place even exists.”
“I know.” Elijah tilted his head to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his shirt (Jon’s shirt, he reminded himself belatedly). “But what else are we going to do? We can’t leave her alone, and she won’t go anyplace else unless we take her there first.”
Jon knew better than to try to talk Elijah into abandoning Julianna—and in truth, Jon no longer wanted to leave her behind, either. For better or worse, it seemed, the three of them were in this nightmare together, and he also knew there was no chance whatsoever of convincing Julianna to give up or even to delay her quest. Still, a gnawing feeling in his gut was telling him that Pawnee was the last place on earth they should go; he was almost certain that whatever was waiting for them there was far worse than anything they had already gone through.
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen to me for a minute, okay?” He waited for Elijah’s nod, then pressed on. “Look, I want to help Julianna, too. I really do. But there’s no point in going to Pawnee, is there? We both know that even if it’s still there, which is a HUGE if by the way, then it’s not going to be the same place Julianna thinks it is. It’s probably only going to upset her to see it, and every second we waste chasing down the messed-up picture she has in her head is a second we should be using to get someplace safe.”
Jon could hear the desperation creeping into his own voice but he didn’t care.
“What if we head for Canada instead?” he urged, locking eyes with the younger boy. “All three of us, I mean. We can tell Julianna we’ll bring her back here in a couple of months, when things have cooled down. She might actually listen to you, if you just ask. Please, man. I know she might not go for it, but can’t we at least try to talk her out of this? We’re not going to get another chance to get away, and I’ve got a really, really bad feeling about where she’s taking us.”
Jon’s fear was palpable, and Elijah couldn’t help but be unnerved. He chewed on his lip, considering the possibility of reasoning with Julianna, but then sighed again, knowing full well what the outcome of such a discussion would be.
“It’s no good,” he said. “She won’t listen.”
The courage that was Elijah Hunter’s birthright as Mary Hunter’s son had been awakened in him that night, and it wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. Risky or not, Julianna was headed to Pawnee, and Elijah was going with her. He didn’t understand why, exactly, but he knew it had something to do with the look on her face when she’d come back to them a few minutes ago. He couldn’t turn his back on her now, especially when she was so close to the end of her journey.
He hesitated, looking away as tears sprang to his eyes.
“You should take off after Julianna gets you patched up, man,” he said softly. He made himself go on, even though the words caught in his throat. “I’d miss you like hell, but I’d understand.”
There was a short, strained silence. He could feel Jon glaring at the back of his head, and a few seconds later the older boy began to swear under his breath. Elijah couldn’t hear most of what he said, but “dumbass” and “fucktard” came through several times, more clearly than the rest. Elijah wiped his eyes on his sleeve and gripped Jon’s shoulder tightly, unable to keep from smiling a little at each muttered curse. He knew what the oaths really meant, and that Jon was just frightened, and letting off steam.
Julianna bustled back down the hall with her arms full. In addition to a first aid kit, she was also carrying all the things that Bonnor and the sheriff had confiscated from the boys during their arrest—belts, wallets, Jon’s money and books, the keys to the Volkswagen. She was inordinately pleased with herself for unearthing all these treasures in the sheriff’s desk and file cabinet, but dangling from the index finger of her right hand was the find she was most proud of:
A spare set of keys to Sheriff Buckley’s squad car.
“Only thirteen miles to go!” Julianna rejoiced, easing the Volkswagen into first gear and pulling out of the Dairy Queen parking lot in Mullwein. Ronnie Buckley’s squad car was in back of the Dairy Queen, its exposed rear bumper concealed behind an overturned garbage can and a picnic table.
Yippee, thought Jon Tate, slumping against the passenger door of the Beetle’s front seat. He felt as if he were on the way to his own funeral, and he couldn’t believe he was doing something so stupid of his own free will—even getting Becky Westman pregnant had been smarter than this.
“It’s nice to be back in the Bug again,” Elijah said from the backseat, enj
oying the feel of the warm night air blowing through the open windows as they drove south on Highway 69, toward the Missouri border. He leaned forward to talk to Julianna and Jon. “When I buy my first car I’m going to get one just like it.”
Elijah was suddenly acting almost as jubilant as Julianna, and Jon scowled, not understanding how the younger boy could so easily shake off the sense of doom that was consuming Jon. Still, he supposed, it did feel better to be out of the dead sheriff’s car and on the road again; they had the highway to themselves, and the stars and the moon were out, and the only sounds were the hum of their tires on the pavement and the familiar purr of the Volkswagen’s small engine. It was peaceful and comforting, and he could almost convince himself everything was going to be okay.
Almost.
The Beetle’s high beams lit up the asphalt road in front of them, but everything else was in darkness save for an occasional porch light they passed on their way out of Mullwein. Jon rested his head against the door frame and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his shoulder. There’d been some aspirin in the first aid kit at the jailhouse, but Julianna had only allowed him to take two of the caplets for fear of thinning his blood too much while he was still bleeding.
Remembering how deftly Julianna had dressed his wounds in the jail cell made Jon believe that Elijah may have been right about her being a nurse. She had told him the bullet had only damaged muscle tissue, miraculously missing his lungs, bones, and arteries; she’d also told him he was fortunate he hadn’t been wearing a shirt when Bonnor shot him, because otherwise the bullet might have left some cloth in his body on its way through, increasing his risk of infection.
Yeah, I’m one lucky son of a gun, he thought wearily, opening his eyes again. He’d impregnated a fourteen-year-old girl; he was wanted for murder, arson, and rape by the FBI; he’d been beaten and shot by a redneck deputy; he was being chauffeured around by a woman with more loose screws than a lumberyard, and he was most likely going to be dead before the night was over.
Just call him Lucky Jon.
Julianna seemed to sense his disquiet. She turned her head and smiled at him, shifting the Volkswagen into high gear as they left the town limits and passed into the countryside.
“You don’t have to be one bit nervous about meeting my family, Jon,” she said, raising her voice to carry over the wind. “You’ll feel right at home the second you walk through the door.”
Jon tried to smile back at her, touched by the genuine sweetness in her expression. “Thanks,” he said awkwardly, ignoring Elijah’s grin. “I’m really looking forward to meeting them.”
“There are only five of us you have to deal with,” Julianna continued. “Momma and Daddy, my two older brothers—Seth and Michael, who are both about your age—and me. We live on a farm just north of town, in a big old house Daddy and some of our neighbors built right before Daddy and Momma got married. Anyway, I can’t wait for you to see it. I think it’s the best farm in Pawnee.” She laughed. “Momma tells me I’m biased when I say things like that, but I swear it’s true. We live on top of a hill, and the sky is so pretty at night it makes you cry to look at it. When I was little I used to think I could reach up with my bare hands and touch the moon and the stars.” She laughed again. “Seth and Michael both tease me about that all the time, don’t they, Ben?”
“Yep,” Elijah agreed, still grinning. “They sure do.”
Jon raised an eyebrow at Elijah, then turned back to Julianna. “So what are your brothers like?” he asked, surrendering to the absurdity of the conversation.
Julianna snorted. “Like little boys in big men’s bodies.” A rabbit darted across the road in front of the Volkswagen and she gasped, barely missing it. “They like to think of themselves as all grown up, just because they’ve gotten so tall, but they still act like two-year-olds. They show each other the food in their mouths when we’re eating, and the other day when we went swimming in our pond they got in a fight about whose turn it was to use the inner tube.” She pinched the bridge of her nose as if warding off a headache, then dropped her hand to the steering wheel again. “But they’re also very sweet. For Momma’s birthday this year they made a chocolate cake for her and decorated it with marshmallows and whipped cream, and they carried Momma around the kitchen in her chair while Daddy and I sang God Save the Queen.”
Jon and Elijah had stopped smiling. Julianna’s eyes were glistening, and in the scant illumination from the moon and the Beetle’s headlights the tears on her face looked like ghostly war paint.
“Julianna?” Elijah touched her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
She attempted to laugh. “I’m not really sure.” She blinked a few times and bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “I’m just homesick, I suppose. This is the longest I’ve ever been away from my family.”
Elijah squeezed her shoulder. He wanted to tell her they’d be in Pawnee in just a few minutes, but the feeling of certainty he’d had at the jailhouse about this being the right course of action was weakening. Maybe Jon had been right.
He sighed, leaving his hand on Julianna’s shoulder as he stared out the window at a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield. Right or wrong, it was too late to turn back now; Julianna was driving, and Elijah had learned his lesson about trying to take the wheel from her when she didn’t want to relinquish it. Besides, if Julianna was right about how close they were to where she’d grown up, they’d be there in fifteen minutes, and surely the police wouldn’t be able to find them once they were off the main roads—at least not without a great deal of luck.
Julianna was already smiling again as if nothing had upset her, and a few seconds later she began to hum. Elijah blinked as he recognized the tune: It was something his mother had sung as a lullaby many times when he was little. He no longer knew the words, but he seemed to remember it was called “Goin’ Home.”
The hot night air suddenly felt cold to him and he shivered, recalling something else. He’d asked his mother to stop singing that song after he’d gotten old enough to understand what it was about.
Death, he thought. It’s about death.
Chapter 14
Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home
Quiet like, still some day, I’m just goin’ home
As Julianna Dapper steered the Volkswagen toward Pawnee on that late Sunday night in June 1962, the words to an old spiritual she had learned from Ben Taylor’s mother some forty years before kept repeating in her mind, though she didn’t sing them aloud. She was too preoccupied with the moonlit countryside around her to do anything but hum the simple melody as her eyes flitted over each tree, sign post, and farm pond they passed, taking everything in and trying to quell a growing feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach.
The late-night sky of northern Missouri was just as dark as it should have been, and the smells of dirt, cows, pigs, and wild flowers were no less pungent than what she expected. Something wasn’t right, though—she couldn’t put her finger on what it was exactly, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. As they passed a radio tower and a massive grain silo she stopped humming for a moment, perplexed.
“Where on earth did those come from?” she asked, frowning.
Ben Taylor’s presence in the backseat reassured her, as did a familiar intersection at the crest of a hill, followed by the welcome sight of Günter and Polly Miller’s dairy farm in the distance.
But we already passed the Millers’ farm, she reminded herself, shying away from the disturbing images that came with this recollection. How had the dairy farm gotten in front of them again? Her eyes widened as they drew closer; she could make out half a dozen new buildings that didn’t belong on the property.
What in heaven’s name was happening?
Jon Tate said something to Elijah that Julianna didn’t hear, and she glanced over at the wounded boy in the passenger seat next to her. She remembered picking Jon up recently in her father’s car, y
et she couldn’t recall exactly where or when, nor could she remember what they had done with Eben Larson’s Model T. Her eyes took in Jon’s naked chest and flat stomach and she flushed a little, grateful for the darkness in the car. His bruised knee was only an inch or so from the gearshift, and she found herself wanting to touch him.
Shame on me, she thought with a rueful smile.
She resumed her humming, using her voice as a sort of sonar to navigate through all the anomalies of time continuously confronting her: a road that was much straighter and smoother than it should have been, hundreds of telephone poles that weren’t supposed to be there, a face in the rearview mirror that sometimes belonged to her dear friend Ben Taylor, and sometimes to a taller, more handsome boy named Elijah Hunter, whom she had met only the day before.
Morning star lights the way
Restless dreaming done
Shadows gone, break of day
Real life just begun
Even her own voice was a conundrum. To her ears, her humming sounded richer and deeper than it should have. She’d always been able to sing, but this was different, somehow, darker and more nuanced. It was the resonant, mature voice of a middle-aged woman, and it both thrilled and appalled her. She didn’t really sound like herself at all, she realized; she sounded more like her mother.
Julianna reflexively turned west onto Route 46. The hills grew far more pronounced and the road narrowed and roughened, changing from pavement to asphalt, and then at last to gravel. Potholes the size of washtubs forced her to slow down, and she gritted her teeth at each delay. The boys could feel her growing anxiety and they remained quiet, peering through the windows at the hayfields surrounding them.
“Almost there,” Julianna whispered after a few long minutes of silence. The large hill they were approaching sent a thrill of recognition through her, and she gunned the Volkswagen to make sure they’d have enough momentum to reach the summit of this last obstacle between herself and Pawnee. She had to downshift before they reached the top, but once there she eagerly looked for lights in any of the stores in the valley at the base of the hill, but she could see nothing, not even the stores themselves.
