by Ninie Hammon
“The logging road’s that way.” Jack pointed back over his shoulder in the direction opposite where the boys were taking Becca. “And he’s not even supposed to pick us there until after lunch.” Jack didn’t have a watch, but Daniel did.
“It’s not even eleven o’clock,” Daniel muttered.
“Yeah, and then we’d have to drive all the way around Bear Claw Mountain.”
The mountains of Caverna County were crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of roads that meandered through the valleys and hidden hollows in no particular hurry to take anybody anywhere. This cluster of mountains was stretched out north/south around the base of Bear Claw Mountain—so named because it was roughly shaped like one. They’d left Hester Road for a logging road on the east side of the blunt end of the claw—where Burnt Stump stood sentinel. Then the highway turned north and circled around the pointed end. Melody Creek, where the six boys had entered the mountains, was on the west side of Bear Claw.
“They’ll be long gone before we could get there in a car to stop them.”
Jack stood, gasping and thinking.
“But if we climbed up to Burnt Stump, we could go back down the other side to Melody Creek—with Bishop!— and cut them off.” he said. “When we don’t show up at the logging road, Burnt Stump is where he’ll go looking for us.”
Daniel turned his eyes toward the scorched tree pointing at the sky on Bear Claw Mountain’s southern summit. On three of the mountain’s sides, the land was a fairly gentle upward slope. But the east side facing Jack and Daniel was a craggy, boulder-strewn ridge that looked—from here at least—all but impassable. “Climb up the east face of Bear Claw and then sit there, waiting for Bishop?”
“It’s a gamble. We just have to hope Bishop gets impatient quick when we’re not on time at the logging road.” Daniel looked dubious. “It’s a chance. Meeting Bishop as planned has no chance at all. You got a better idea?”
Daniel didn’t.
“Then come on!” Jack reached down for the picka-nick basket and stumbled off toward the mountain. Though Daniel was still slightly bent over, his belly muscles apparently spasming from the blow he’d taken, he kept up with Jack.
“What”—Daniel was panting—“just happened here?”
“I have no idea.”
CHAPTER 9
2011
Ten-year-old Miranda Burke was sobbing. She lay with her face buried in her pillow on the Princess Bride bedspread Mommy had ordered from that store that had old stuff you couldn’t get anywhere else. She didn’t know Andi was listening and then Andi’d had to pretend to be surprised on Christmas morning.
The first night she’d slept under it, Mommy had pulled it snug up around her neck, kissed her on the nose and said, “Night, night, Buttercup.”
The memory made Andi cry harder, and she let it all out, didn’t try to hold her feelings in like she did when Daddy was around so she wouldn’t make him sad, too. But she bet he was doing the same thing.
She lifted her head and cried out at the ceiling in a tear-clotted voice, “I’m mad at you, God.” And she was, too. So mad it almost was stronger than the hurt deep in her belly that felt like she was about to throw up.
“You let that bad man kill Mommy, and you didn’t do a thing to stop it. And you could have. You could have sent a big white angel with a sword or something. You could have kept Mommy alive, but you let her die. I hate you!”
Ossy hopped up onto the bed beside her. The big calico circled around twice before curling snug up against Andi’s side. He wasn’t supposed to get cat hair on Andi’s bed, but he slept with her every night.
She put one arm around Ossy, buried her face in his fur and fingered the small gold cross she wore—Mommy’s necklace that Daddy said her mother would want her to have. Daddy’s wrist had been in a cast so Uncle Jack had put it around Andi’s neck the day of Mommy’s funeral. She swore she would never take it off, never for her whole life. The thought of her mother’s funeral made her cry harder. She didn’t just miss Mommy, she needed Mommy—to braid her curly brown hair because Daddy’s big fingers couldn’t get it right, to finish teaching her how to iron a shirt and how to make pancakes shaped like rabbits and snowmen.
And now she couldn’t even smell Mommy anymore! At first, her perfume was still in her clothes, and Andi would go into her closet when Daddy wasn’t home and let the skirts and blouses hang down around her and pretend that Mommy was only at the grocery store and would be home any minute.
Now, even the perfume smell was gone.
“Why, God?” she cried out, pleading. “Why did you take my Mommy away?”
Andi finally cried herself out, cried so long and hard that her chest hurt. The sorrow was still there, of course, but crying had made it a little better. Not much, but a little. It was something she could hide when Daddy got home and came upstairs to tuck her in and say her prayers with her. She sat up and took a tissue from the box the housekeeper, Mrs. Beavers, always made sure to leave there for her. She blew her nose noisily, but before she could reach for another tissue to wipe her eyes—the same light blue her mother’s had been—she felt something soft on her cheek. Not a tissue, some kind of cloth that was softer than velvet. She heard it then, the sound she had no name for—singing with no words and music made with no instrument she had ever heard.
Sitting beside her on the bed was Princess Buttercup in a dress made of light, her long blonde hair flowing down her back, shining—with sparkles. It wasn’t Princess Buttercup at all, of course, but an angel who was wiping Andi’s tears away. And Andi thought she could see tear streaks on the angel’s cheeks, too.
“I want to show you something, Andi,” she said. It was the voice that had spoken in her head the day her mommy died, told her to ring the bell to save Daddy’s life.
“Shapes and lights like before?”
“No, something different. But you must look at it very carefully and remember as much about it as you can.”
Then the walls of the room vanished, and Andi was somewhere that didn’t have a bed or piles of soft stuffed animals or boxes of tissue right there beside her. She was in a room with no bed at all, just a pile of blankets on the floor and bare wood walls and a single light bulb hanging down on a wire in the middle of the ceiling. There were boards over both the windows, nailed on the outside, so you couldn’t see out. Well, maybe you could see a little bit if you got up real close and looked through a crack. Andi went to the nearest window and put her eye to the biggest space between the boards, about as wide as her thumb.
There was nothing to see, though, only woods and off to the edge where she could barely see it, a gravel driveway. Then a car pulled up into the shadow of the house on the driveway, a blue car that had a bright-yellow license plate all splattered with red mud. There was an Indian design in the middle below the words “Land of Ench…” but the rest was covered with mud.
She couldn’t see who got out on the driver’s side, but she heard two doors open and close so there must have been somebody in the back seat on that side behind the driver. She could see the other side of the car, though, and the person in the front on the passenger side was a young man wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. He was a black man, but his skin wasn’t as dark as Miss Theresa’s, which was the color of the piece of coal Andi had picked up off the ground that time she went with Mommy and Daddy on vacation in the Smoky Mountains and stopped on the way to see the coal mining museum in eastern Kentucky. He was more the color of Uncle Jack, except his hair wasn’t cut off like Uncle Jack’s, so short there was barely any curl left to see. Just the opposite! This man’s hair hung down around his shoulders in long things called dreadlocks that Andi thought looked as disgusting as the bottom of a bird’s nest.
The men were talking, but she couldn’t hear what they said at first. Their voices were drowned out by another sound. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. A train. No whistle, just the cars going by somewhere close on the other side of the house. It was a nice
sound, friendly somehow, but Andi couldn’t have said why that was. Then the clickety-clack faded, got softer and softer as the train pulled away.
In the quiet, the scene faded, too. It didn’t blink off like somebody’d turned off the television. It got more and more dim, until you could see the images, but you could also see through them. She could see the window with the wood nailed over the front, and she could see her My Little Pony dressing table through it.
“Will you remember what you saw?” Princess Buttercup asked.
Andi nodded, then burst out, “I’m mad at God, and you can tell him I said so!”
She reached out her hand and cupped Andi’s cheek. “He knows.”
Then she was gone, and Andi was sitting alone on her bed in her room.
And she couldn’t feel the anger or sadness anymore. They’d been replaced by a cold emptiness that wasn’t something you cried or yelled about. It was something that settled in around you so you couldn’t smile or laugh or see anything bright and good and happy in the world.
Andi wondered if she’d ever stop feeling that way or if when somebody you loved died, you didn’t ever feel like smiling again for the rest of your life.
*****
Daniel was disoriented, as if he’d stepped out of the flow of time and was a step behind reality. He awoke to a world that had shifted in such a profound way its movement surely would have been captured on a seismometer if one had been handy.
No, he didn’t wake up to that world. To wake up, one must first go to sleep, and Daniel hadn’t closed his eyes all night. He had become aware of the shifting of his world, the realignment of the planets in his solar system the night before when he’d had to call the head of church security to bail him out of jail.
Bail him out of jail.
Every time those words popped into Daniel’s head, he wanted to giggle. Wasn’t a thing funny about it, but the words put him in mind of a black-and-white gangster movie from the forties starring James Cagney.
Ok, he hadn’t been in jail. You had to be arrested to go to jail, and he hadn’t been charged with anything—yet.
Daniel looked at his watch again. Still too early to call Jack. But perhaps not too early for Theresa. She always said she was a “bird sleeper”—went to bed with the chickens and was out of bed, dressed and had a load of laundry in the washing machine before the rooster’d had its first cup of coffee.
She answered on the second ring.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“How do you know something’s wrong?”
“Phone don’t never ring when the sun ain’t shone on the day ’less’n somethin’ bad’s happened. What is it?”
He told her.
“He put the hammer down on both of us in less time than it takes to cook a pot roast. He’s been planning this for a right smart while.”
“Both of us?”
“Mr. Gerald and Miss Minnie…they dead.” She told him what happened.
“Why doesn’t he just try to kill us, Theresa, like he did before?”
“Jack was wondering the same thing. I don’t know for certain, but I ’spect he wants us alive so he can make us miserable. Payback. But I think he also wants us so busy with our own problems that we won’t have no time to make trouble for him. We got to talk, you, me and Jack. Figure out how we gone get ourselves out of the fixes he’s landed us in so we can get on with what we set out to do.”
That seemed so ludicrous at that moment Daniel had to bite back a laugh. Right. What they’d set out to do—stop Chapman Whitworth from becoming a Supreme Court justice. The man who, in an evening’s work, had managed to totally devastate Theresa’s life and his own. Oh, and once that was done, they’d turn their sights on finding the efreet responsible for all this and destroy it or defeat it or banish or it take its batteries out or whatever it was they’d done to it when he, Jack and Becca were twelve years old. Except permanently this time. Piece of cake.
“You boys need to come over for lunch. You call Jack. I’ll make chili.”
Theresa’s chili. Oh, how he and Jack had loved Theresa’s chili when they were kids. Daniel felt a sudden aching longing in his chest for a time and a life and a world that could be set aright by a bowl of chili.
He tiptoed into Andi’s room and sat for a long time, just watching her sleep before he woke her to get her ready for school. Looking at her face in repose, he was always struck by her uncanny resemblance to her mother—except for the dimples and the sprinkling of freckles on her nose that Emily said looked like she’d been dusted with cinnamon. When Andi was awake, the animation of her face hid the resemblance. There were always emotions playing across it. The child felt the world and everything in it in such an intense way that her face mirrored joy, sadness, pain and fear like the waters of a still pool.
Andi could see demons, and when she did, the horror on her face mirrored the evil she could see. Looking into her eyes then was almost like looking at the devil himself.
Emily’s face had not been nearly as mobile as her daughter’s. He’d always thought Emily looked like a china doll. Her face, so chiseled and beautiful, was seldom marred by any emotion—except for the night he’d confronted her about her affair with Jeff Kendrick.
The thought knifed into him with such ferocious pain he almost moaned out loud. Daniel had never had a chance to make things right between them before she was murdered. He’d been on the phone to her when she died, heard the gunshot that killed her. It was a sound that still tore open his soul if he let himself think about it. A sound—
“Daddy?”
Andi looked at him from the bed, still in that netherworld between sleep and wakefulness. Her hair was a jumble of chestnut curls; a sleep crease on her left cheek sliced right through her dimple. He loved her so much at that instant his heart might explode right there in his chest.
“Is it time to get up?” she asked.
Andi hated to get up in the morning about as much as she hated to go to bed at night. Sleeping had been an issue with the child since she was a baby. They’d tried to divide and conquer, he and Emily. Daniel had the unenviable task of getting the child to stay in the bed and go to sleep at night, and Emily faced the grumpy, whiny, sleepy little girl in the morning.
Now, Daniel woke Andi, usually with a kiss on the forehead. And Andi never complained, merely got up and got dressed. She wasn’t hard to put to bed anymore, either. Since her mother’s death, she had become Little Miss Perfect, maybe because she feared she had to be perfect to keep Daddy from going away, too. Or maybe because she knew her mother had died to save her life. He knew he shouldn’t let that behavior continue, but he neither knew how nor had the energy or will to do anything about it yet.
He crossed the room and sat down on the edge of her bed.
“No, actually you can go back to sleep for fifteen minutes if you want to,” he said. “I’m a little early this morning—since I didn’t get to see you last night. I intended to be home before supper, but—”
“Where were you, Daddy?”
I was in jail, sweetheart, arrested, handcuffed and led away in chains.
“I got busy and the time got away from me, I’m sorry.”
“That’s ok, Daddy. Mrs. Beavers and I had fried chicken, and I even went to bed early.”
Yes, he definitely needed to do something about Little Miss Perfect.
“If you want to snooze a little longer—”
“She came again last night. Princess Buttercup. And I had another one of those dreams that you have when you’re awake. What Miss Theresa calls visions.”
Andi had started having visions when she woke up in the hospital after she…died—from a stray bullet that had lodged in her chest when Jack killed a demon-possessed shooter in her school. Her visions of shapes had saved his life and Jack’s, so Daniel knew they were important messages, warnings. But he still couldn’t get his arms around the weirdness of it, coming from his own little girl, with scabs riding both knees and hair that looked
tousled five minutes after you brushed it.
“What did you see?”
Andi told him about the boarded-up window and the car and the man with bird-nest hair. The visions were as real to Andi as the walking-around world, and she reported what she’d seen in minute detail. It made absolutely no sense, of course. This vision had people in it, though, not just images, and it left Daniel with a disquiet he couldn’t put his finger on.
“And you never saw the man before? At school maybe or at the grocery store or in the mall?”
Andi made a face.
“No! If I’d ever seen him before, I’d remember his hair. It was gross, Daddy.”
He smiled at that and held out his arms to her.
“We’ll talk about the guy having a bad hair day later. Right now I am in serious need of a great big good-morning hug.”
She sat up and flung her arms around his neck and squeezed hard. Like she didn’t ever want to let him go. He didn’t want to let her go, either.
CHAPTER 10
2011
Jack’s media hurricane made landfall at the police station before Jack got to work. Grazing on the front steps was a small herd of reporters, and the parking lot held two behemoth broadcast trucks. Jack drove slowly past them and went around the block to the back entrance.
Unfortunately, one enterprising news agency had seen a chance to snag a good parking space, and their gargantuan truck, complete with a satellite dish Frisbee attached to the roof, was pulled up—illegally—behind the building. It was the low-watt local station, the ambulance-chasing, three-headed-baby-stolen-by-aliens station. As soon as they saw his cruiser and recognized Jack, they were on him like powdered sugar on doughnuts.
He opened his car door, and a microphone was thrust in his face by a twenty-something reporter who looked like a fashion model. Didn’t ugly fat women have brains and charm and wit?
