The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  Then she shook it off. “But Becca stayed. She had to. Didn’t have nowhere to run to. And if any of the three of you needed to run, it was Becca.” She shook her head. “Poor thing, lost her two best friends and her stuck here all alone. Soon’s she graduated from high school, she was gone, too.”

  “And you never heard from her again?”

  “Not to speak of. I don’t know anybody who did. She sent us a couple of pictures, early on. They was custom printed so they said ‘Becca Hawkins’ in white script on the front. But there wasn’t no letter or nothing—just a few sentences scribbled on the back.”

  Theresa stopped then, an odd look on her face.

  “What?”

  “Nothing…just thinking ’bout them pictures. I stuck ’em up on the refrigerator and…nothing.”

  “So Becca was with us…no, we were with her and a light when something happened that summer,” Jack said.

  He seized the lead, the only one he had. “Sounds like this Becca and I need to have a little chat.” A thought returned to his mind that had been half-forming there. “And somebody needs to warn her. If a wack-job who tried to shoot a room full of children had been looking for me at the time, I’d want to know about it.”

  “We need to find her,” Daniel interrupted. “You’re playing with my chips here, too, you know. I want to help.”

  He shot a glance at Theresa but didn’t look at her as he spoke. “I’ve taken a leave of absence from the pulpit. One of our teaching pastors has taken over for me until I…get some things sorted out.”

  He stopped again and dragged the conversation back to Becca. “I’m not sure it’s a lead pipe cinch Becca knows any more about all this than we do. It’s not natural that we don’t remember. Something happened that… And maybe the same thing happened to her.”

  “She’s got big holes in her memory,” Theresa said. “Me and Bishop seen her—some, not like before—after you boys left. They’s lots she don’t remember, but it’s not like everything’s been erased the way it was with you two. Still…” Theresa stopped again. “The thing with Becca is—what she says she remembers might not be accurate. Becca wasn’t never the same after that summer.”

  “Do you know how to get in touch with her family, somebody who might know how to find her?” Jack asked.

  “She ain’t got no kin a’tall, least none that I know of, ’cept her daddy.”

  “Does he still live in Bradford’s Ridge?” Daniel asked.

  “Nope. He’s been gone from there a good long time.”

  She must have seen Daniel’s face fall because she continued.

  “He ain’t hard to find, though. He’s in the iron house. The Kentucky State Penitentiary, serving twenty years for growing dope.” Her voice dropped in pitch, had a sharp shadowy edge to it. “That’s what they got Billy Ray Hawkins for, but I b’lieve he done worse than that, a whole lot worse than that.”

  * * * * * * *

  Daniel and Emily hardly spoke when she got home from the banquet. Even Andi was subdued. Normally, the little chatterbox would have filled up every silent moment, giving Daniel a blow-by-blow account of the whole evening.

  He wanted to believe she was just tired. After all, it had been barely two weeks since she got out of the hospital. She just needed time to get her strength back, that’s all. Her withdrawal didn’t, couldn’t mean she’d heard her parents discussing divorce.

  The night they found Andi crying on the stairs, Emily had slept on the daybed in Andi’s room. You know, so she’d be right there if Andi had another dream.

  He was sure she’d sleep there again tonight—and from now on until… Yeah, until what?

  So Daniel undressed and went to bed because that’s what you do. You perform the simple, mundane functions of life on autopilot when your conscious mind has been relieved of its command by fatigue, shock, fear, anger, grief—any of the above, all of the above.

  Ever since…he couldn’t even force himself to give a name, a label to that time. It was only images and sounds. A phone ringing and ringing. A little green ball on a monitor climbing each jagged hill slower than the last.

  It had taken only one day.

  Happy marriage. Loving wife. Rock-solid faith. Healthy child.

  Badda boom, badda bing. Broken marriage. Adulterous wife. Everything he thought he believed shattered, and a little girl who died, but didn’t—and now saw invisible creatures made out of bugs.

  One. Day.

  He was shocked at how easy it was to lose everything you thought you’d have forever.

  The engine of energy, the life force, the persona of the Reverend Daniel Burke—the golden boy with a smooth, conversational style of preaching that was most of all comforting, and if there was anything folks needed in the uncertainty of today’s world it was comfort—kept chugging along on autopilot while everything that was Daniel Burke had come unfastened from it and was slowly rolling to a halt on the track behind. Daniel watched it go, watched who he thought he was get more and more distant until he couldn’t see it at all anymore.

  It felt like he was taking off a mask. Only there wasn’t a face behind the mask. There wasn’t anything at all.

  Daniel lay alone in the cold, silent bed where sleep was out of the question. Dozens of thoughts and images roared around his mind, witches on broomsticks, whirling and cavorting, each with a face from hell itself and all of them too fast for him to catch. He’d reach for a thought, grasp it, then it would turn to ash in his hand and blow away. Maybe he could sort things out if he could only hold on to any of his thoughts long enough to think it.

  Theresa said he didn’t believe a word he preached, and he suspected the old black woman wasn’t wrong about much in life. He had believed once—really believed. He was certain he had, though he had not a single memory of that time. But then something had happened. Or maybe nothing had happened. All he knew was that right now he was operating on the cold dregs of faith, what was left in the bottom of a bucket with a hole in the bottom. And when he’d needed to drink from that bucket, needed the cool liquid to calm his heart and soothe his soul, the cup scraped across the bottom with a metal-on-metal sound he could feel deep in his soul.

  Daniel looked up, watched the shadows of the ceiling fan march across the ceiling, elongated black shadows that looked like the legs of a spider.

  And he remembered.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the time it has taken to pick up his mother and sister, the armload of supplies to stock up the cabin and drive up into the hills, Daniel has lost the entire summer. It is as completely obscured by fog as a valley seen from a mountaintop on a cool autumn morning when the creek mist fills it like cream in a bowl.

  But the summer is all that’s completely gone. Daniel had watched in mute terror the relentless flow of the fog across his mind, but it came up short at the last day before school had let out this summer. Like that was some mental barrier, a dam of some kind, the thick gray-black fog stopped there, boiled and rolled behind it but went no further.

  Mist did, though. A thin veil of mist the color of frost flowed right out past the barrier and into the rest of Daniel’s memories. Obscuring. Making them soft and muted and fuzzy and out of focus.

  He grasps frantically and latches hold of his memories of Christmas. And they are there, still intact. That soothes him a little. He is still frightened by what has happened, but the blind terror is beginning to recede. It didn’t, after all, cloud up his entire mind and leave him a vegetable. He couldn’t remember this summer. That was it—horrible as that was, it could conceivably have been a whole lot worse. Right?

  And there might be some reasonable, rational explanation for the phenomenon. For all Daniel knew, it wasn’t all that uncommon! As soon as he could get the attention of either of his parents long enough to talk to them about it, he might discover that what had happened to him was only temporary, that he’d wake up in the morning and all the memories would be back, and it would be like it had never happened at all.
>
  Of course, he isn’t likely to get the attention of either one of them now. There has been a horrible disaster, a fire at Twin Oaks Nursing Home, and his mother is almost hysterical about it. Though she doesn’t know anyone personally who lived or worked there, in a town the size of Bradford’s Ridge, she knows dozens of people whose mother/father/sister/brother/uncle/aunt/son/daughter or cousin did, and she has worked herself into a frenzy of sorrow and grief on their behalf. His father is in his own state of vicarious distress. He is, after all, a minister, and there are hundreds of hurting people in his congregation who need him right now, but he has obligated himself to perform this wedding and he must honor that obligation.

  As Daniel’s father cranks the cabin’s generator into life to supply electricity, his mother fusses around Marianne like a fly buzzing around a piece of watermelon. Margaret Burke adjusts the clip in Marianne’s hair, licks her own thumb, and uses it to wipe off an imagined smudge on the little girl’s cheek. Marianne is blissfully unaware of her mother’s doting and sits on the hard plank floor with her blocks, setting one carefully on top of another.

  Daniel smiles. It would be impossible for anyone to begrudge the little girl the attention that is showered on her. Tiny and delicate in a size eighteen-months dress instead of a size three, she is in every possible way a little princess. Wide eyes a stunning shade of jade green, eyelashes so long they brush her cheeks like feather dusters, shiny hair the color of rust in a tangle of curls on her shoulders and a heart-shaped mouth that’s spread in a perpetual smile, lighting her face from within like a candle.

  “Build it, Dan-Dan,” she says, and holds out a block that looks huge in her tiny hand. “Make it big as the sky.”

  Daniel’s mother babbles all manner of instructions about how to care for Marianne, as if Daniel had never met the child. And what is there for Marianne to get into here? The cabin is as bare as that monk’s chamber he’d seen once at Gethsemane Monastery. The meager essentials of furnishings—no drapes on the windows or rugs on the floor. No telephone. There is running water from a cistern out back and electricity—if the generator remains running.

  “…and if that generator dies, you take Baby Girl outside on the deck and wait there for us to get home,” his mother is saying, smoothing Marianne’s curls behind her ears. “There’s a big yellow moon tonight. That’s plenty of light. I don’t want you burning a candle with your little sister around.”

  Even Daniel’s father rolls his eyes at that one, takes his wife’s arm and guides her away.

  The room is suddenly quiet, like a twister has blown through and out the front door. Daniel hears the car start and the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway leading to the dirt road. He looks out the front window and watches the car’s headlights, visible until the car reaches the huge oak tree on the other side of the lake that towers above the cove where Daniel’s father likes to go fishing. It is a couple of miles away along the road that encircles the water and the marina where the wedding will be held is a mile or so beyond that.

  When the car is out of sight, Daniel sits on the floor beside Marianne, slumps back against the wall and tension whooshes out of him in a long sigh. Relieved of the burden of pretending he is fine, Daniel allows himself the luxury of an emotional reaction to the fog/smoke/mist/brain tumor that has stolen his whole summer! He begins to tremble. It’s unnerving so he puts his hands under his butt and sits on them.

  Marianne notices nothing, of course. She sits beside his feet, stacking blocks, making that sound that isn’t quite humming she makes when she is concentrating.

  Daniel leans his head back against the wall, closes his eyes and tries to think.

  “Look, Dan-Dan,” Marianne squeals. “What I find!”

  “That’s good, Sweetheart,” he says without opening his eyes. “Build me a castle.”

  She giggles.

  “It comed out of the cuft in your pants,”she says. “It tickles.”

  The cuff of my pants?

  “Lookit!”

  Daniel opens his eyes.

  Marianne is on her knees beside his feet, her hair shining copper and burgundy in the lamplight. Her face wreathed in a joyous smile, she holds out her chubby hand to him. In the center of her tiny palm is a gigantic black widow spider, so huge two legs dangle off the side.

  Sometimes, when Daniel remembers the scene, the spider turns slowly around in her little hand to face him. But that isn’t real, couldn’t be real.

  Time derails and crashes into a tree on the side of the track. His mind is at once racing with a thousand jumbled thoughts and so sluggish it can’t form a simple coherent one.

  But in reality there is no time to think anything at all, no time even to blink before Marianne suddenly screams and shakes the spider off onto the floor. The biggest black widow Daniel has ever seen, it moves with astonishing speed—scuttling across the hardwood floor slats back toward Marianne’s leg.

  Daniel leans forward and slaps it, knocks it away. Then he leaps to his feet and while the spider is still sliding sideways across the floor, he stomps it with his heavy boot, again and again, smashing it until it is nothing, a gooey black smear, no recognizable anything.

  With his pulse a great rushing waterfall in his ears, he stands rigid for a moment before the sound of his sister’s screams penetrates. Then he drops to his knees beside her and grabs her hand. Two small red holes are visible in the center of her little pink palm. The skin has turned an angry bright red in a circle around them, like a target.

  Marianne shrieks, wails, tears slathering her cheeks, obviously in agony.

  God, help me! What should I do?

  The better question is what can he do? With no telephone, there is no way to summon help. There are no neighbors between the cabin and the marina three miles away. There is no first aid kit in the cabin, not that Daniel would know what to do with one if there were.

  Ice!

  When he sprained his ankle, his mother put an ice pack on it, said it would keep down the swelling. He leaps up and rushes to the refrigerator and yanks open the freezer door. But the electricity hasn’t been on long enough and the ice trays are filled with water.

  Marianne is now writhing on the floor.

  “Dan-Dan,” she screams, looks at him with desperate, pleading eyes. “Hand huuurts. Tummy hurts. Mommieee!”

  She is crying so hard now she is having trouble catching her breath.

  There is only one thing Daniel can do. He scoops the child up into his arms and runs to the door. He has trouble with the knob with Marianne wiggling, but finally pulls it open, dashes across the deck and down the gravel driveway to the road marked by a lone set of tire tracks visible in the moonlight. Then he races down the hill at a dead run under the cratered face of the blind moon.

  Within half a mile Daniel is panting, gasping for breath. But his breathing is not as labored as Marianne’s. She is thrashing so violently in his arms he has trouble holding onto her. Screaming, incoherent, her flailing left arm batters his face and her fist smashes his lip. Repeated blows eventually bloody his nose. Her right arm hangs limp at her side, though, swelling so huge he fears the skin will rip from the pressure.

  Right before they reach the big oak tree, Marianne goes into convulsions. She stops screaming and her body goes suddenly rigid. Her eyes roll backward in her head, her teeth clench, her lips turn blue and saliva drips out the corners of her mouth. Then her back arches upward and her legs and arms begin to jerk.

  Daniel pulls up short, struggling not to drop her as she jerks and spasms. It seems to go on for a long time, though it probably doesn’t last more than a couple of minutes. Then, as suddenly as flipping a switch, she goes limp in his arms, and he feels a sudden warmth down the front of his shirt where she has wet herself.

  Daniel begins to run again. The short stop allowed him to catch his breath and with her body quiet, she is easier to hold and he can go faster. He talks to her now in spurts between breaths.

  “…be there soon, Sw
eetheart…

  Gasp.

  “…see Mommy and she’ll…

  Gasp.

  “…fix it, make it…

  Gasp.

  “…all better.”

  The awareness of it comes on him slowly, steels over him like ice spreading out into his veins from a bottomless pit of cold, dark emptiness in his belly. He runs from it! Though already gasping for every breath, he bursts into a sprint. Running faster than his exhausted legs should be able to carry him. Flying through the air, his eyes blinded by tears.

  Running and running and…

  He staggers to a stop, can’t run another step, drops to his knees and stares down at the precious little girl in his arms. Though he is panting, sucking in air in mighty, heaving gasps, Marianne is absolutely still, her body unmoving. She isn’t breathing at all.

  Sweat, tears and blood from his split lip mingle and drip off his chin in droplets on her flowered sundress. She is peaceful now. The moonlight caresses her beautiful face, as perfect and still as a hand-painted china doll. And he thinks he can see, imagines he can see a ghost of the sunny smile that always bathed her face in light.

  He cradles her to his chest in a gentle hug, rocks back and forth. He hears a sound that is more than crying, a grunting, groaning noise that his mind has trouble connecting to the ripping ache in his own throat.

  Back and forth, he rocks. Back and forth. He kisses her forehead and her cheek, wants to sing her a lullaby, but the only sound he can produce is the grunting sound of feeling his heart torn slowly out of his chest.

  Minutes pass. An hour. A week.

  Finally, he gets slowly to his feet and sets out down the dirt road. He cradles his precious baby sister tenderly in his arms, but all feeling has drained out of him. The nightmare of running with the road elongated in front of him and the end never in sight is now reversed. He takes a step, then two, time snaps back like a stretched rubber band and he is stepping up onto the plank walkway leading from the shore out to the brightly lit dock. He passes some people, a few. They stop and stare. A man speaks to him, a woman blurts out a little cry and covers her mouth with her hand. But he stops for nothing, moving relentlessly toward the big houseboat on the end, aglow with thousands of white Christmas lights and adorned with balloons and streamers. He can now see his father standing on a raised platform under an arbor on the back deck in front of a woman in a white dress and a man in a suit.