by Ninie Hammon
He paused then, and his gaze seemed to drill all the way down to the bottom of Jack’s soul. “But I have only once in my life seen actual darkness. Not the lack of light, but an entity in itself. A black thing. That was on the senate floor the day Chapman Whitworth came up to meet me after the president’s nomination was announced. He put out his hand to shake, and he held mine a beat too long. He knew that I saw. And he was glad.”
The three of them sat in silence then, time suspended. Senator LaHayne sat slowly back in his chair and returned to the relaxed state that wasn’t relaxed at all.
“All right. I don’t need you to tell me how you know Chapman Whitworth is evil. I suspect I am better off not knowing. But you came here to tell me something I can use against him. What is it?”
They told him all the things they’d rehearsed telling him, the part that was finally what they’d agreed they’d say as they drove up Interstate 75 from Cincinnati. That Chapman Whitworth was trying to ruin them. That he had framed them. That he had hacked to death two harmless old people.
“This Bosko is the key,” Jack said. “First we have to find him, and then we have to get him to talk. I don’t want to mislead you, senator—both of those things are long shots. And even if we manage to pull it off, I know he’s not exactly a credible witness. But back his story up with the case against him in Whitworth’s court where the evidence disappeared, the surveillance footage that puts Whitworth in Bosko’s car the night of the crimes and Whitworth’s fingerprints on an envelope full of money found in Bosko’s apartment, and I believe we could—at the very least—cast grave doubt that the man who’s strutting his stuff to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States is who he claims to be, that he really isn’t as squeaky clean as a new rubber duckie.”
The senator turned away from them when they finished their explanations. He gazed out the window and said nothing, merely unconsciously entwined his fingers into “here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open it up and there’s the people” over and over.
Then he turned back to them. He spoke the words softly but with an intensity that shouted so loud Jack’s ears rang from the sound.
“I’ve been grasping at straws…asking, pleading for something. You boys are my answer. You’re all I have, but apparently you’re all I need. The hearings start Friday. That gives you six days. You go out there and get me evidence—you hear me! And I will bury Chapman Whitworth with it.”
CHAPTER 25
1985
It had taken some doing for Becca to talk Jack and Daniel into hiking with her up to Red Rock, but she’d been cooped up in the house for so long she was desperate. Her father was almost never home and neither knew nor cared what she did or where she went—well, he’d never in a million years have let her set foot in Bishop and Theresa’s house so she’d told him her weekly Bible study was at Reverend Burke’s. Unfortunately, her father happened to be in town on Tuesday when all the bad things happened, and when he got home, he’d barked at her to “stay in the house,” in that awful, gravelly voice she still hadn’t adjusted to. He used to sound normal, sang along with country music songs on the radio. But the day after his birthday, he’d come home and couldn’t talk at all. When his voice finally did come back, it was ragged and hoarse, and it had been that way ever since.
Jack and Daniel had left their bikes at the barn behind her house—the barn where they’d gone that night last winter to find out why everybody said drinking was so much fun and had gotten so hammered they’d had to spend the night there.
Daniel’s was a standard ten-speed bike. Jack’s was a strange-looking hybrid of the parts from several dead bikes. Both had racks extending out over the back bumper, space to carry the picka-nick basket and sometimes for Daniel to carry Jack when his old bike had a flat tire——which it often did. Neither of them had a bike as fine as Becca’s—a real motor scooter with all the bells and whistles her father could lavish on it. He hadn’t been home on the Christmas morning he gave it to her, but the housekeeper had shown her where to find it in the garage. Without their bikes, Jack, Daniel and Becca could never have become the Three Musketeers.
Little more than a stone’s throw from each of their houses was the railroad. Tracks snaked through town and then crossed the river on a small trestle and cut a trail through the woods to a tunnel under the mountain behind Becca’s house. The actual rails had been taken up years ago, but the smooth cindered track remained. Though a lot of geography separated them, they could all meet at any of their three houses in ten or fifteen minutes, depending on how fast they pedaled.
After they turned up an old logging road, overgrown and barely visible, Becca reached down and removed the leash from DD’s collar, then watched in delight as he raced after a fluttering butterfly, then stopped to sniff every rock, branch, bush, stick, leaf or dirt pile they came to, his tail wagging so furiously it was only a blur of brown behind him.
“I wish I had a dog’s nose,” Daniel said.
“You’d look dopey,” Jack said, “but we’d love you anyway.”
“I mean I wish I could smell like a dog.”
“Stinky fur and doggie breath? That ‘love you anyway’ thing—there are limits.”
Becca couldn’t hold on to her giggles. They were always like that, teasing and cutting up—but never mean, never hurtful. Just silly.
“I mean I wish I had the olfactory organs of a canine so I could discern a level of smell of which human beings are incapable—that get it?”
Though their manner with each other looked comfortable and easy on the outside, Becca could sense a strand of tension within that surprised and saddened her. There were things they couldn’t—wouldn’t—talk about, now. There never had been before.
Daniel was hopping from one slick rock to another in a creek, showing off, when he slipped and landed on his butt in the water—a dunking feat he’d been avoiding all day. That’s when Becca noticed McDougal was missing.
“Dougal Dog,” she called out. “Here, DD.” She expected the dog to burst out of the bushes and come running. But he was nowhere around.
“We can see him from up there,” Jack said, pointing to the crest of a hill up the trail from them.
Daniel was ahead and he suddenly stopped. Jack was behind him, still blocking her view. When Jack moved out of the way, all the air was sucked out of Becca’s lungs as if somebody had punched her hard in the belly.
Standing beside a big rock next to the trail were Jacob and Victor. McDougal had bitten Victor that day in the woods, and now Victor had the dog clutched tight to his chest with his fingers around McDougal’s snout to keep his mouth closed so he couldn’t bark. Jacob’s wasp demon was laughing maniacally. Victor’s lizard-faced demon merely eyed her with lidless red eyes, flitting its forked tongue out of its mouth. From where she stood, she could smell the stench of brown goo that trailed from him and feel the icy blast of the cold that surrounded them.
She finally found enough air to cry out, “McDo!” and started toward them.
“I’d stay right where I was if I’s you,” said Jacob. “Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your worthless mutt.”
“Don’t hurt DD.”
“Give Becca back her dog,” Jack said and started toward them.
“Say please,” Victor said.
Jack ground his teeth together. “Please,” he said.
“Ok, since you asked so nice—sure, we’ll give him back to her.”
Then Victor lifted the dog up, holding him in one hand by the neck. McDougal was wiggling frantically, squirming and whimpering, trying hard to break free.
“Here, you go,” he shouted. “He’s all yours.”
Vic reached up and took the dog’s head in both hands, then twirled the dog’s body around it, the way you wring a chicken’s neck.
Around and around the body went—once, twice—then Jacob snapped his wrist like popping a whip, and the dog’s body flew out into the air and plopped into the dirt a few feet away. Dougie�
�s legs were running…running, and then they were still. Blood gushed from the bloody hole above his shoulders where his head had been.
Becca let out a horrified wail, and Victor and Jacob turned and ran off into the woods. She knelt in the dirt beside DD’s body and lifted him tenderly into her lap. Then she rocked back and forth, sobbing.
“It’s my fault.” Her anguished words were strangled by tears. “I shouldn’t have let him out of my sight. All those other dogs, you know the Bad Kids killed them, too.” She closed her eyes, felt the warmth of the animal in her lap and continued to sob.
Daniel knelt in the dirt beside her. “Becca, we need to go now,” he said with great tenderness in his voice. “I’ll—we’ll—carry McDougal for you. Jack and I will dig a grave and we’ll bury him.”
“I shouldn’t have let him off the leash. But he loves to run in the woods, and I never thought…”
She opened her eyes then, looked at her dog’s bloody body, and then at the dog’s head that Daniel was holding and burst into hysterical sobbing again, hugging the limp ball of fur in her arms and shaking her head.
“Dougie. Precious DD.”
She felt Jack’s hands on her shoulders. “We have to go,” he said.
She knew he was right. Drawing in a shaky breath, she eased McDo’s body out of her lap, and Jack helped her stand.
“We’ll go to the sheriff now, the three of us. We have proof!” Daniel said.
But Becca knew nobody would believe a twelve-year-old boy could kill a dog that way. Any more than they’d believe a boy could pull a man’s arms right off his body. Just snap. She was repulsed by the memory, horrified anew by the brutality. That was when she saw the Bad Kids at the foot of the hill. Jack saw them, too, and elbowed Daniel.
All six of the Bad Kids were there. They weren’t looking at Jack and Daniel. They all were staring at her, their demons glaring, hatred distorting their already grotesque features, cold flowing from them in a wave. The combined force of their evil was a hammer blow that staggered her, left her alone and cowering. Mindless horror rose in her, threatening to tear loose every mooring she had to life in a world with sunshine and blue skies, and cast her out into a darkness so profound it had substance. She couldn’t breathe or think, and she felt herself begin to slide …
Then there was warmth beside her, all around her. The warmth shoved the cold away, pushed it back as if it were a snowball on ice, and then wrapped itself snug around her. Becca felt like she’d been immersed in a sweet-smelling bath. Golden light shone, making the world beyond it look shadowy and unreal. There were gold sparkles floating in the light, and Becca longed to reach out and touch one, put it in her pocket and take it away to be with her always.
Becca felt a warm, soft hand take hers. She looked up then into beauty so pure it almost hurt to see it, into eyes the color of robins' eggs in a porcelain face, with black hair cascading down beneath a silly red-and-white striped hat.
“I said I’d come to hold your hand,” the angel said, “so you wouldn’t be afraid.”
When the Bad Kids started up the hill toward them, Jack leaned close to Becca and spoke softly. “Danno and I are going to take them. When we jump them, you run as fast as you can all the way home. Don’t look back until you get there.”
“No,” she said, then looked past him at the approaching evil that turned the very air black with its approach.
“I see you and I’m not afraid of you,” she called out to the demons. “You don’t have any power over me.”
Jack and Daniel looked at her, uncomprehending. The Bad Kids stopped, motionless. The demons began to scream, cries of rage and hatred so ugly it would have savaged her ears to hear them, but the warm glow sealed her in.
Like Tupperware.
And the barrier it formed around her was impenetrable by six demons or a thousand demons or ten thousand demons.
“Really?” Jacob said. He reached down into a gunnysack he carried, pulled open the drawstrings, then flung the sack at her so that the contents came out in the air. “Not afraid of this?”
The snake landed in the dirt not three feet in front of Becca. The diamondback was huge, probably five feet long, and it curled instantly into position, its head in the middle of the coil, its tail sounding a rattling alarm as it drew back its whole upper body to strike.
Becca didn’t flinch.
Tupperware.
“A rattlesnake?” Cole Stuart roared at Jacob, grabbed a handful of his shirt front and yelled in his face. “You stupid—”
The angel lifted her hand, causing the light that was fabric to shimmer, sparkling with a million tiny points of golden light. When she lifted her hand, the snake also lifted off the ground. The six boys started backing up as soon as the snake began to rise. When they turned and ran down the hill toward the woods, the angel made a slight gesture with her raised hand and flung the snake into the air after them. It hit the ground with a plop and slithered quickly into the undergrowth.
******
2011
Daniel held his cell phone against his ear with his shoulder so he could use both hands to turn the newspaper page to the jump from the front-page story. Jack picked up as Daniel was composing the message he was going to put on Jack’s voice mail.
“You do know what time it is,” Jack grumbled.
“This morning’s Enquirer has a story about Senator LaHayne and Chapman Whitworth.”
“Read it to me. I don’t get the paper.” Jack was fully awake now.
Daniel began to read.
A reliable source inside the office of U.S. Senator Thomas LaHayne revealed yesterday that the senator intends to present evidence—
“Evidence?” Jack was incredulous.
—at next week’s confirmation hearings that Supreme Court candidate Chapman Whitworth has committed grave improprieties. The source said that the senator, who has long opposed Whitworth’s confirmation, will provide documentation—”
“Documentation?”
“Stop repeating everything I say, Jack. You sound like a parrot.”
“We don’t have documentation!” Jack was practically shouting.
“Don’t shoot the messenger. Shut up and listen to the rest of it.”
The rest of the story said that the senator had only just come into possession of the material regarding Whitworth and that the information would kill his chances of being confirmed.
“Why would the senator put out a story like that when he knows we don’t have any proof?” Jack said.
“How do you know the senator leaked the story to the press?”
“What, you think Whitworth did it—went rushing to the media because his reputation is whiter than a virgin’s wedding dress and he couldn’t wait to spill punch all over it?”
“Well, the boring confirmation hearings just went from a ho-hum story to front page above the fold,” Daniel said.
Jack sighed. “Apparently, all this is part of the senator’s plan.”
“It’s part of somebody’s plan.”
CHAPTER 26
2011
When Theresa heard the name “Chapman Whitworth,” she whirled around and looked at the screen. Then she went to the set and turned up the volume and sank down in Bishop’s favorite chair to watch.
It was a news show, the kind of thing they used to fill up Sunday morning programming when wasn’t nobody interested in watching television.
“We have invited Mr. Whitworth to join us here on Meet the Press this morning,” said the talking head in a suit, “in light of the allegations against him coming out of Senator Thomas LaHayne’s office yesterday.”
“I don’t know what I can say in my own defense since the senator has never said what it is he thinks I’ve done,” Whitworth said.
The talking head opened his mouth to speak again, but Whitworth kept talking, looking right into the camera, speaking slowly and distinctly. “This has to be some misunderstanding. Senator LaHayne opposes my nomination. I don’t know why that is,
but it is certainly his right to do so.”
Theresa leaned in toward the striking, square-jawed man with a scar on his face who was speaking so sincerely to her.
“But the senator is a good man, an honorable man who has served our common state of Ohio with integrity and a humble spirit for almost three decades. Someone has misled him. He would not, he is not capable of, making something up out of whole cloth.”
Obviously, he was telling the truth, and Theresa admired his generous spirit, that he would speak so highly of a political opponent. She felt the confidence he exuded, and it buoyed her up, carried her along in a sense that no matter what happened to be going wrong at that minute, everything was going to be fine in the end. He would see to it that it was.
“My reputation is absolutely clean, my conscience clear, so I have nothing to fear from the senator or anybody else. But I would stake that reputation right now on the senator’s honor. He is a deceived man, not a dishonest or malicious one.”
Theresa heard a noise behind her, only a little squeak, and turned to see Becca staring in wide-eyed horror at the television screen. As soon as Theresa looked away from it and was no longer paying attention to Whitworth’s voice, her impression of him changed, and he didn’t seem capable and sincere and honest at all! She was shocked by how completely she’d been taken in. His voice, more than mesmerizing, stronger than hypnotic, was the voice that had spoken to Eve in the Garden.
Becca’s face was white, contorted in an expression of such terror and loathing her features were almost unrecognizable. She’d been doing better. In the week she’d been staying in the spare room in Theresa’s basement, she had lost some of that hollow-eyed, haunted look. She was clean—still too thin, but Theresa thought she might be putting on a little weight. She still wasn’t beautiful like she’d been before, and maybe she never would be again. She had the fragile quality she’d had as a child, though, like she was a porcelain doll that was in danger any moment of shattering into a thousand pieces.
