The Third Hill North of Town

by Noah Bly

  “We’re very sorry to wake you, ma’am,” Mary said. “But it’s an emergency, and we need directions.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping, honey,” the woman answered. She was taller and heavier than Mary, though not by much, and there was no hint of the South in her voice, as there was in Mary’s. “I was just staring up at the ceiling in my bedroom. What are you looking for?”

  For some reason, Mary’s spine began to tingle. “We’re trying to find a town that’s not on the map,” she answered. “It’s called Pawnee. Have you heard of it?”

  The older woman had been fussing with the waist-tie on her robe but her hands now froze in front of her and she stared hard at Mary for several long seconds before responding.

  “Who on earth have you been talking to?” she asked. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

  Mary assured her that she was acting on her own behalf, and quite serious.

  “I’ll be doggoned,” the woman said, looking dumbfounded. She resumed cinching up her robe but couldn’t seem to make a proper knot. “My husband and I used to have a farm in Pawnee, but the whole town burned to the ground back in twenty-three, and nobody ever took the trouble to rebuild it. How did you ever hear of such a pitiful little place?”

  The mysterious tingling in Mary’s spine became a shiver she couldn’t suppress. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Julianna Dapper’s hometown was no longer in existence, but if it had indeed vanished so many years before, it seemed a huge stroke of luck that the first house Sam had stopped at that night just happened to be owned by somebody who not only knew of Pawnee, but was actually a former resident.

  “It’s a long story, and we don’t have much time,” she said quietly. “Can you tell us where it was? It’s very important.”

  The old woman was clearly baffled; she looked from Mary to Edgar and then back again at Mary before responding.

  “Just get back on Route 46 there right behind you,” she pointed past them at the gravel road, “and head west for about two miles. Soon as you see a road going north, hang a right and you’ll be smack in the middle of Pawnee. Nothing’s there now but corn, though.” She paused, still studying Mary’s face with incomprehension. “Were you looking for somebody in particular, honey? I knew every soul in town, and as far as I know I’m the only one left alive these days who can say that.”

  Mary glanced at Edgar, who was staring at the old woman with a fascination that equaled her own.

  Jung called this sort of thing synchronicity, Edgar Reilly was reminding himself, taking refuge in psychological theory to calm the goose pimples on the back of his neck. The odds of immediately knocking on the door of perhaps the only living survivor, aside from Julianna, of a town that had ceased to exist four decades ago seemed to be a whopper of a coincidence to Edgar, too, and Edgar did not care for such things—especially late at night on a deserted country road.

  Mary looked over her shoulder at Sam in the station wagon, then faced front again. “We’re looking for a woman named Julianna Dapper, who supposedly grew up around here.”

  The old woman’s brow wrinkled and she shook her head. “There was only one girl in Pawnee named Julianna, but her last name wasn’t Dapper. It was Larson.”

  Edgar started. “But that’s her! Julianna’s maiden name was Larson!” He reached for a cigarette and dropped the whole pack on the porch in excitement. “Did you know her?”

  The woman smiled sadly. “My youngest boy and her were thick as thieves their whole lives. But there’s no way in the world we’re talking about the same person. The Julianna Larson I knew died the night of the fire.”

  Mary raised her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon? Are you certain?”

  Sudden grief twisted the woman’s features. “I’m afraid so. My son was with her, and he died, too.”

  Edgar knelt in the heavy silence to retrieve his cigarettes. “I don’t understand,” he murmured. “They have to be the same person.”

  Mary reached out to touch the other woman’s wrist. “I’m very sorry to upset you,” she said. “I don’t understand this, either, but the person we’re looking for is named Julianna, and her last name used to be Larson when she lived here.” And she’s with my son instead of yours, now, she added silently. “She’s been living in Bangor, Maine, for a long time, but according to Dr. Reilly,” she indicated Edgar, “she knows all about Pawnee.”

  The older woman caught Mary’s hand in her own and held it. “Julianna Larson burned to death with her family, and my”—her voice cracked—“and my boy Ben, too. The sheriff and the coroner identified all the bodies in both fires. There’s a tombstone with Julianna’s name on it up at the Lone Rock cemetery.”

  Mary Hunter frowned. “There was more than one fire?”

  The woman struggled to explain. “The Larson farm burned down, too, that same night, a mile or so north of town. But the fire at their farm wasn’t an accident, like the one in town was. My son and all the Larsons were murdered by a man named Rufus Tarwater, who shot them all and then tossed their bodies in the fire.” Her face twisted. “Tarwater got away, and was never caught.”

  Something else clicked in Edgar Reilly’s head. “Ben!” he blurted. “You said your son’s name was Ben! Was his last name Taylor, by any chance? Are you Mary Taylor?”

  Mary Taylor’s grip tightened painfully on Mary Hunter’s hand as she gaped at Edgar.

  “How could you possibly know that?” she breathed.

  Mary Hunter sighed, glancing over her shoulder toward Sam in the station wagon. They couldn’t stay there any longer to sort this out; she was certain Gabriel would be coming any time now.

  “Can you please come with us, Mrs. Taylor?” she asked abruptly. “I have a feeling we might need your help.”

  The blacktop on Route 46 ran out but Gabriel Dapper didn’t slow down as his Cadillac’s tires hit the gravel. He was just in time to see the taillights of Bonnor Tucker’s station wagon disappear over a hill directly ahead of him. Dottie Buckley had given Gabriel the same vague directions she had given the Hunters and Edgar Reilly, but they’d gotten a three or four mile head start on him and he’d begun to fear he wouldn’t catch up.

  “There you are,” he breathed, hurtling down the road.

  Thanks to the resourcefulness of the nightshift dispatcher for the Missouri State Patrol, Bonnor Tucker knew exactly where to look for his fugitives, as did the Iowa and Missouri State Patrols. The dispatcher had located a fifty-year-old map listing Pawnee, Missouri, as an unincorporated town in Harrison County, right at the junction of Route 46 and County Road YY. Even so, only four officers—Bonnor Tucker, an Iowa State Patrolman, and two Missouri troopers—were en route to Pawnee on that late Sunday night in June; the Iowa patrolman was about one minute behind Bonnor, both headed southwest, and the the two Missouri troopers were approaching Pawnee from the east in separate vehicles. No one else on duty at that hour was close enough to offer assistance.

  And that was just fine with Bonnor Tucker.

  “The less fuckin’ dumbass troopers the better,” he muttered, crossing the state line between Iowa and Missouri with the bubble light flashing on top of his squad car.

  One of the Missouri troopers had already given Bonnor flack over the radio about intruding on their jurisdiction, and the last thing Bonnor was in the mood for that night was a pissing contest over who had the right to track down and deal with Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate. It was a moot point, as far as Bonnor was concerned, because Gabriel Dapper would beat them all to Pawnee, anyway, and if the look on Gabriel’s face when he had charged out of the jailhouse was any indication, Bonnor doubted the two little shitheads who had killed Ronnie would still be alive by the time Bonnor and his colleagues caught up.

  “I just wish I could be there to see it,” Bonnor said sadly.

  “I don’t feel very well,” Julianna Dapper whispered to Elijah.

  She continued to spin in a slow circle, searching the fertile earth around her for any sign of human habitation, and was finally g
iven a reward for her diligence: Thirty feet south of where she and the boys were standing she glimpsed what appeared to be a small wooden raft in the middle of a lake of corn. It took her a moment, however, to recognize this anomaly for what it was; with everything gone it was hard to keep the hilltop in perspective.

  “That was our well,” she murmured. “It looks like they’ve boarded it over to keep people from falling in, but I bet that’s it.”

  In her mind’s eye, Julianna saw hundreds of ashes floating through the air above her head. Some of them were still burning, and the wind carried them toward the barn, and the toolshed, and the outhouse. One eventually landed in a stack of hay bales inside the open barn door, and soon the entire hill was alight with fire. Smoke billowed around her, and the horses in the corral behind the barn screamed in terror, and the night air was distorted from the heat, making everything she saw look like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. It was hell on earth, and Julianna was the only one left alive to witness it, standing in the middle of her backyard.

  Except it seemed she wasn’t alone after all: Ben Taylor was there with her, and Jon Tate, too.

  But Ben is dead, she protested silently. He was the first one Rufus killed.

  For thirty-nine years, the youngest child of Eben and Emma Larson had managed to elude the memories of her last night in Pawnee. She had also sidestepped the monstrous images that haunted her dreams, banishing them from her thoughts the instant she awakened. Every now and then, however, she’d find herself shaking for no reason, and she quite often felt like screaming—but she always ignored these physical and emotional quirks, or dismissed them as the by-products of fatigue, or a migraine headache. But on a sunny afternoon a few weeks before that Sunday night in the cornfield, Julianna Dapper had come home from teaching in Bangor and read a story in the newspaper about a fire on a family farm in Maine. The people in the newspaper article were unknown to her, but the similarities between their fate and that of her own family, decades earlier and half a continent away, were impossible to ignore. The Maine fire was the result of arson, and those who had lived on the farm—a mother, a father, and three children—had all died. Worse yet, the autopsy revealed that each of the victims had been shot in their beds before the blaze was set.

  And Julianna Dapper, née Julianna Larson, confronted by nothing more than an ugly coincidence, had finally lost her grip on sanity.

  “Momma was next,” she now whispered, standing on the hill where her family had been slaughtered a generation ago. Julianna had never known for sure if Emma had already been dead by the time Eben tumbled into the inferno of the burning kitchen with her mother’s body in his arms, but she had prayed for this to be the case, unable to bear the idea of Emma suffering—as Eben had—when the flames engulfed them.

  “Rufus shot Momma, and then he shot Seth,” she informed Elijah and Jon in an eerily calm voice. “Then he shot Michael, too.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Elijah murmured. “Jesus God Almighty.”

  “Daddy died in the fire, though,” Julianna continued, staring past the boys at her memories. “I couldn’t get the back door open and he burned to death in the kitchen. He was holding Momma but I think she was already dead.”

  Elijah felt tears running down his face, one after another. He watched Julianna fall to her knees, and he rushed to her side and held her tightly to his chest. Jon Tate was there a second later, kneeling beside them. The older boy looked as miserable as Elijah felt, and Elijah reached out to him, as well, taking one of Jon’s hands in his own.

  “I ran back to Michael,” Julianna murmured in Elijah’s ear. “But he’d already died.”

  She lifted her head and studied Elijah’s wet face in the moonlight as if his features were unfamiliar to her. “You really don’t look like Ben very much,” she said quietly. “But you’re just as sweet.” Her eyes drifted away to the well once more and she half turned in his arms. “Ben died right over there. I was trying to drag him out of danger but I wasn’t fast enough. Rufus shot him in the head.”

  As if the boarded-up well held all her memories and was now releasing them one by one, Julianna began to share everything that passed in front of her eyes. She spoke in a steady murmur, without hurry or inflection, and Elijah held her, and Jon Tate sat close by, and the young men were as silent as children listening to a ghost story beside a campfire. She started by telling them how

  . . . how after watching her father die she had gone back to Michael and found him dead, too, his head resting on Seth’s arm and his eyes open, staring sightlessly at the stars he had adored . . . how the blood on his bare stomach had looked like a garish tattoo in the flickering light . . . how she had sat motionless beside him and Seth as the house fire raged unopposed, flinging burning ash into the sky . . . how she had stumbled to the backyard to sit with Ben, too, after remembering she’d left him there . . .

  . . . how she had eventually spotted the orange-reddish glow in the sky above Pawnee, and realized her town was as dead as her family and her dearest friend . . . how she had begun screaming as the barn and the other buildings on the property also caught fire . . . how she had regained her senses sometime later and knew she would never have the strength to endure another day on that godforsaken farm or in that godforsaken town . . .

  . . . how in her desperation to flee from so much horror she had somehow dragged the remains of the three dead boys she had loved onto what was left of the front porch of the burning house, to be cremated along with her parents . . . how while doing this she had glimpsed Rufus Tarwater’s crumpled body on the lawn and raced to save a ten-gallon drum of gasoline from under a lean-to by the tool shed before the lean-to also caught fire . . . how she had rolled the drum back across the yard . . . how in the extremity of her grief she had saturated the dead man’s clothes with gasoline, then set a flaming brand to his shirt . . . how she had continued pouring gas on the carcass until there was nothing left of Rufus Tarwater but a charred mound of flesh . . . how she had ignited the drum itself, and flung Rufus’s rifle in the farm pond . . .

  . . . how before daylight she had gotten in her father’s Model T at last, as the fires around her began to dwindle . . . how she had driven away from Pawnee forever, or so she then believed, turning north at the end of the gravel driveway instead of south toward town, not wishing to encounter any fellow survivors or speak to anyone who would ask her what had become of her family and Ben . . . how she had driven until the Model T had run out of fuel, and then rolled the car into a ditch somewhere in eastern Iowa . . . how she had hitchhiked from town to town and state to state until she reached Veteran, Maine, four days later, where a distant cousin of Emma’s took her in and Julianna’s future husband, William Dapper, owned a farm . . .

  . . . how she had somehow started a new life, rising from the ashes of her former self . . . how she had married William Dapper and given birth to their son, Gabriel . . . how William had been kicked in the head and killed by a horse three years after Gabriel was born . . . how her heart fell apart once more, almost as badly as it had in Pawnee . . .

  . . . how she and Gabriel had moved to Bangor to escape yet another set of memories . . . how she had evaded and denied her past for almost forty years until it caught up to her at last on her own front porch, breaching her defenses in an unguarded moment and swamping her mind . . . how she had set fire to her neighbor’s garage in Bangor because she’d somehow mistaken it for her father’s tool shed and couldn’t bear to have her memories reawakened . . . how the police “. . . came and took me to the hospital.”

  The stillness on the hilltop was so abrupt that Elijah and Jon—who had been listening to Julianna for nearly twenty minutes without moving or speaking—both started a little, as if awakened from a trance. Julianna seemed to be listening to something, yet all the boys could hear was the sound of their own breathing, and the rustle of the breeze in the corn around them. They waited uneasily to see if she’d resume her narrative, but she remained silent, her head cocked to the side in
the darkness. Elijah cleared his throat and this caused her to stir at last; she glanced at him for the first time in a long while.

  “I’d forgotten everything,” she whispered. “Absolutely everything.”

  She dropped her forehead in exhaustion on Elijah’s shoulder and began to hum again, apparently not expecting an answer.

  Elijah rested his chin on the crown of Julianna’s head. He had stopped crying some time ago but he felt completely wrung out and fragile; he didn’t trust his voice to work correctly even if he could have thought of something more to say. He noticed with surprise that his fingers were still interlaced with Jon’s, and he was reminded again how much had changed in the past two days: Julianna was cradled against his chest and Jon was holding his hand, and he had no desire to break away from either of them. Jon tried and failed to say something; Elijah clutched his hand tighter and closed his eyes.

  Please, Lord, he prayed, feeling the older boy’s pulse beating in his fingers and Julianna’s tears soaking through his shirt. Please help this poor woman, and keep my friend safe.

  The night air was calling to Julianna, distracting her with familiar, evocative smells: the black, rich dirt she was sitting on, a patch of wildflowers on the other side of a nearby fence, the perspiration of her companions.

  “Whew,” she whispered, suddenly wrinkling her nose. “Momma won’t let you boys in the house smelling like that. You can wash up by the well.”

  Momma’s dead, she corrected herself at once, recalling with an effort where she was—or more accurately, when she was. Elijah /Ben spoke her name; she could feel his throat moving against the side of her face. She was too tired to talk, but her well-ingrained manners wouldn’t allow her to just ignore him.