by Ninie Hammon
“No, it can’t,” Jack said. “That woman, Lily Saunders, the one from the elevator. I was doing some digging on her this morning, trying to find her connection to Whitworth. The Cincinnati PD called me a few minutes ago because I’d been asking questions about her earlier—and now they’re the ones with questions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They found her this morning in the river, Daniel. They’re calling it a homicide.”
Daniel couldn’t speak, could feel the color drain out of his face. His stunned silence filled the room like pressure that threatened to blow out the windows.
“They’re going to think I…aren’t they, Jack?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have an alibi for last night, say between two and six am?”
“I was home in bed.”
“That’s not an alibi. We’ll talk later.” Then Jack hung up.
Daniel slowly returned his phone to his pocket.
“Something’s wrong, Daniel. You look…are you all right?”
“Yes and no. Yes, something’s wrong, and no, I’m not all right.” Daniel knew what he had to do.
“Clayton, you need to fire me. I could resign effective immediately and draft a formal letter of resignation, but it would look a lot better for the reputation of the church for you to fire me.”
“I don’t understand, Daniel. I—”
“This situation is not going to get better. In fact, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.”
“Tell me what’s going on.” Clayton seemed genuinely concerned and that touched Daniel.
“That phone call was from a friend who’s a police officer. He told me that the woman—her name is Lily Sanders, I think—who accused me of…who said I…” Daniel couldn’t say the word rape. He just couldn’t. “The woman who has made allegations against me—she’s dead.”
Clayton’s only visible response was a slight intake of breath, not quite a gasp.
“They think it was murder, and I’m guessing they’re going to think…I did it.”
“And you told your friend you were home in bed at the time. Not much of an alibi.”
Daniel was surprised at the way Clayton was taking the news.
“That’s what Jack said.”
“You didn’t do it.” It wasn’t a question, but Daniel answered it anyway.
“No, I didn’t. But I’m not sure I can prove that I didn’t.”
“Far as I know, in this country you’re innocent until proven guilty. Not the other way around.”
Again, Clayton surprised him.
“What’s happening, Daniel? The thing with this woman, it wasn’t some kind of indiscretion on your part or a misunderstanding was it?”
The only explanation was the truth, ridiculous as it was going to sound when he said it.
“No, it wasn’t. Someone is trying to—there’s no other way to put it, Clayton—he’s trying to destroy me. He’s utterly ruthless. I don’t know how…I don’t have any defense against…”
Daniel fell silent and looked down in his hands in his lap. He felt totally defeated. The silence drew out, would have felt uncomfortable if Daniel had been in a place where he noticed such things. When the old man finally spoke, his voice was firm and resolute.
“My grandfather had a saying, Daniel. ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’”
Daniel looked up, confused.
“When you don’t know what to do, you stand, Daniel. You hold your head up, and you stand.”
Daniel gaped at him.
“If you want to resign, I can’t stop you. But this church won’t fire you, not as long as I’m the chairman of the board. And we will support you whether you’re still our minister or not.”
“Clayton, why would you—?”
“That business this summer with the man in the belfry…and Emily. It never made sense to me. What happened wasn’t random violence, was it?”
Daniel shook his head.
“There’s only one reason to try to bring down a man of God. And there’s only one who’d have any reason to want to, one who destroys for destruction’s sake. The Father of Lies. You stand against him, son, and this church will stand right there beside you.”
Daniel felt suddenly close to tears. In all his years at Voice of Hope Community Church, he never knew there was this kind of spiritual depth anywhere in it. But how would he have known? Deep calls out to deep. The reverse is also true. Daniel had only seen the side of the church that reflected back to him his own image.
“Clayton, I…thank you.”
Clayton reached over and put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. He leaned close, and Daniel could have sworn he saw a light flicker in the old man’s eyes, the glint of sunlight off polished steel.
“We know who wins in the end,” he said. “You need to remember that. Now, tell me what’s going on.”
Daniel did. All of it.
******
2011
“Hawkins,” said the guard outside his cell. “You ready?”
Billy Ray sat up and pinned on the face he’d worn every day since he was transferred to the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Danforth from the federal prison in Lexington ten years ago, the docile-prisoner face, the repentant-prisoner face, the rehabilitated-prisoner face, the face that had gotten him released on parole at his very first parole board hearing after he’d served the mandatory twenty-year federal sentence he got for being—what was it they’d called him?—a drug czar.
“You gonna miss me when I’m gone, Baxter?” he asked the guard.
“You know, I might,” the guard said. “You’re the first con in a long time who’s been respectful.”
“Pays to respect the law,” Billy Ray said.
I ever see you on the outside, I’ll slit your throat soon’s your back’s turned.
“What you gonna do now that you’re free?” Baxter asked. “Use all that money you got buried in a boxcar somewhere to buy yourself a dry cleaner’s, maybe, or a likker store?”
Billy Ray laughed a resigned laugh. It sounded totally sincere. It should; he’d been practicing it for years.
“You believe in fairy tales, do ya, Baxter? The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny? Shoot, if I had a nickel for every person who’s asked if I got a pile of money out there waiting for me, I wouldn’t need the pile of money!”
That elicited a chuckle from the guard, who unlocked the cell door then, and held it open. Billy Ray followed the guard down the catwalk in front of the row of cells, hollering out to all the other prisoners he’d sucked up to for years to stay out of trouble—prisoners too stupid to stop shooting themselves in the foot with their own reckless behavior and untamed tempers. There was a time and a place for violence, for payback, for retribution. Prison wasn’t it, unless you wanted your cell number to be your permanent address.
Billy Ray was smarter than that. That’s why he was leaving, and all the other morons were staying. That’s why he was going home to the buried boxcar full of money that he’d managed to convince the whole world was a fantasy. Money he intended to use—every dime of it if he had to—to find his sweet daughter, Becca.
There was, after all, a place for violence, for payback and for retribution.
Elmer Pruitt, known as Possum, picked Billy Ray up outside the prison gate in an old Ford pickup truck with a front bumper held on by duct tape. He’d called in a favor to get Possum to come get him and let him use the truck for three days. Billy Ray had a lot of markers out there. He’d taken the hit for all of them—got ten years tacked on his sentence for refusing to name his accomplices and turn over his “assets.” But he’d given his word he’d remain silent, and Billy Ray Hawkins always kept his word. No exceptions. Oh, he wasn’t abiding by some lofty moral code. He’d just figured out early on that men who kept their word were respected. Do exactly what you say you’re gonna do—every time——and after a while even stupid people understand that when you threaten ’em, you ain’t bluffin’. That’s when respect turned i
nto fear, and being a man other men feared was a good thing.
Inside an hour after he dropped Possum at the pool hall on Main Street, Billy Ray had a shiny new driver’s license, new clothes from Walmart, and a prepaid cell phone that he used to make two calls.
Then he had to report to his parole officer, a fat, stupid civil service idiot named Clarence Bohanan. Bohanan or somebody like him would have control over Billy Ray’s life for the next decade, could yank him back into a prison cell if he so much as went squirrel-hunting—parolees couldn’t own a gun. Or had a beer with old friends—wasn’t supposed to associate with known felons. Shoot, Billy Ray didn’t even know anybody who wasn’t a felon! Well, Billy Ray Hawkins was not willing to live like that—and he’d figured out a way he wouldn’t have to.
Billy Ray had a job as a farm hand working his own farm! The state didn’t know that, of course. He’d signed the deed of the land he’d inherited from his daddy over to Horace Turpin before his trial so the feds couldn’t seize it as the ill-gotten gains of a drug enterprise. They took everything else, of course. Or tried to. But danged if there wasn’t a mysterious fire at the mansion he’d built on ten acres off Hawthorne Mountain Road—house, barn, outbuildings—everything burned to the ground the day after he was convicted. Billy Ray couldn’t have been paroled if Turp hadn’t provided him “gainful employment and a place to live.” And he could count on the man to swear on a ten-foot stack of Bibles that Billy Ray’d shown up every day on time, worked hard, hadn’t caused no trouble and was home in bed in the little house on the back of the farm where he’d grown up by nine o’clock every night.
And while the law thought he was out digging postholes and milking Turp’s cows, Billy Ray’d conduct his business just like he always done.
He hadn’t let himself worry about his “treasure” all these years. It was safe or it wasn’t, and he couldn’t do nothing about it one way or the other. But until a couple of weeks ago, his riches had mostly been his way of keepin’ score. Then an opportunity had come up so sudden and unexpected, it still didn’t quite seem real. Now, he had something to spend his money on that mattered. He could use it to buy freedom. He could purchase the next ten years of his life back. That’s what he’d been promised, and the man who’d done the swearin’ had fairly well better be a man of his word, or he’d wind up buried in a hollow alongside the bodies of that guard, Baxter…and Becca.
The sun had just dropped below the level of the mountain to the west of the farm when Billy Ray finally stood in front of the butt-cheek rocks at the base of the mountain that backed up to U.S. 31. At the sight of them, he felt a little thrill in his belly that was almost like being aroused. There was anticipation mixed with fear as he climbed up the rocks and dropped down into the small space between them that you couldn’t even see until you was right on top of it. He liked places like this, secret, dark places, was always digging around to find them when he was a kid.
The memory hit him like a bolt of lightning.
Shiny black walls and a star shape drawn on the floor. He steps over the chalk line that blurs as his eyes try to focus, and he struggles to remember where he is. He’s drunk. The room is spinning, and he falls on his face, hears the sound of breaking glass. It sounds far away, but it’s not. It’s the amulet, the vial he wears around his neck. It has shattered beneath him on the stone floor.
Then it comes, the nightmare creature appears in a red glow. He looks up at it, leaps to his feet and staggers backward over the chalk line on the floor, his eyes riveted to an unimaginable horror. A scream tears out of his throat, and once he starts screaming, he can’t stop even after he has shredded his vocal cords.
Billy Ray stood stock still for a moment, frozen by the memory. He hadn’t done that, remembered that awful day, in years. It was a nightmare he’d had about a monster once when he was drunk. Just his imagination.
Then how had he damaged his voice?
He’d been to a handful of doctors over the years but couldn’t none of them do anything about it. He’d “shredded his vocal cords,” they’d said. He’d speak in a gravel-throated bark for the rest o’ his life.
He resolutely banished the question and the implications of it from his mind. He had way better things to think about right now than a fantasy monster. He had money to find.
He rolled the wheel-shaped stone away from in front of the metal grate he’d affixed to the rock at the entrance to the cave. He dug in the Walmart sack until he located the hacksaw. After all this time, the padlock would be rusted shut, and he’d come prepared with a new one. It didn’t take long to saw through the old lock and push the door in squeaky protest inward. He stepped inside the cave, inhaled the suddenly cooler air and was certain without needing any further confirmation that in all these years, no one had been here. He suddenly threw back his head and laughed out loud. How crazy was that, some doper burying a boxcar full of riches?
He stood in the cave entrance, laughing, for a long time.
CHAPTER 12
1985
Bishop Washington paced beneath the blackened stump. Theresa was the one in the family done the pacing, and when he’d tell her to sit down and relax, she’d give him a look sharp enough to cause internal bleeding and tell him her worries was chasing her and if she sat down, they’d catch her.
Bishop’s worries about the three children he’d brought to the woods were chasing him, roaring through his mind like monsters on Harleys, and if he was to sit down, they’d run him down and kill him.
He shouldn’t have brought ’em! Shoot, he probably shouldn’t have taken them fishing a week ago, neither, or to the pond to skate and to Long Drive Hill to go sleddin’ last winter. But them children soaked up the attention and affection he and Theresa lavished on them like butter on warm toast. Jack, the tough guy, who went home every night to a beatin’ by his good-for-nothing father. Daniel—from a perfect Christian home where his father cared way more about the pain in his congregation than he did the loneliness of his own son, and his mother cared only about his little sister—period. And Becca, fragile as a china doll, who lived in the house with the biggest and meanest dope grower in the county. They’d been drawn to the warmth of the Washingtons at the annual Christian Youth Rally two years ago. When Isaac had started a Bible study every Thursday evening in their home afterward, the dozen kids who came originally dwindled in a couple of months down to the Three Musketeers—Jack, Daniel and Becca. Becca came because she knew, and Bishop was the only person in her life who understood. Jack and Daniel came because Becca did.
Those three had hero-worshipped Isaac, thought he was—
Can’t go there.
He heard a scrambling in the rocks behind him on the cliff side of Bear Claw. Then up popped Daniel Burke, climbing over a boulder and jumping down the last few feet to the ground. Jack was right behind him. Their hands and knees was scraped, they shirts soaked in sweat. Dougal Dog leapt up on the back side of the rock and down off it, but Becca was nowhere in sight.
“What are you doing?” He stuttered in disbelief in unison with the boys’ jubilant cry: “Bishop!”
It was hard to tell which one of them was the most surprised—or the most thrilled—to see the other.
Daniel come runnin’ across the distance separating them and flung his arms around Bishop’s waist. Jack looked like he wanted to do the same thing but didn’t, and after a moment, Daniel musta decided his was a little-kid response, and he stepped back.
And then they was talking, babbling and interrupting each other, close to tears, telling a horror story so scary it shoved aside the speech that’d been forming in Bishop’s head about their promise to stay together in the woods and the dangers of climbing up the east face of Bear Claw Mountain.
Fear stood in the center of his mind now, hot and stinking. This was the evil in the woods. Unless these boys was just exaggerating gettin’ beat in a fight—and they wasn’t—Cole Stuart was possessed by a demon so powerful that Bishop could sense the evil of it
miles away.
But how could it have happened so fast? He’d seen the boys from Brewster Academy three days ago, and they was fine—chests out, blustering boys but not bad kids. So how did one of them get possessed?
“Bishop, those boys weren’t…right,” Daniel sputtered. And Bishop understood the difficulty of trying to describe the “otherness” of someone whose body and will had been taken over by a creature from Hell. “I never saw anybody who looked that mean, that—”
“Filled up with hate,” Bishop said. “With his face all closed up shut and ugly.”
Jack was better at reading people than Daniel was.
“You know something about this, don’t you, Bishop? What? How could Cole do…and why would they kidnap Becca?”
“I don’t have no idea why they’d take Becca, son.” Then his growing fear and anger boomed in his James Earl Jones voice. “But they ain’t gone take that child nowhere!”
The boys jumped at the rumble, but he could tell they was glad. They was just kids themselves, after all, too young to have to deal with a thing like this, and whether they’d admit it even to themselves, they was eager to hand the problem off to a grownup who could fix it. “I’m gone go get her!” His voice quieted. “And you two gone stay right here with McDoo.”
He raised his hand to quiet the instant protest. “No discussing to be done. You boys would just get in the way. You sit and have some lunch, and I’ll come back”—he stopped and amended—“Becca and I’ll come back and get you.”
Then he was runnin’ through the woods. Yeah, runnin’. Fear propelling him as he set his face for what he was going to have to do—stand up to a demon and defy it. In all life’s fears, wasn’t nothing worse.
******
2011
Theresa looked hollow-eyed when she greeted Jack with a big hug at the door. The wound on her forehead wore only a Band-Aid now, but the swollen lump was plainly visible. Daniel looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, said he’d already had a run-in with the press but didn’t want to talk about it. Jack was sure he looked just as bad. The lame, the halt and the weak. Up against one of the most powerful demons in the universe.
