Satan’s Lambs

by Lynn Hightower

  Lena nodded. “I don’t want to bother her. I don’t want to cause her problems. But Charlie is four years old.”

  “That’s what Walt said. And Melody’s staying overnight for a while, so she ought to feel as safe as she can, this time of year. But don’t stay past five-thirty or so, okay? That will give her plenty of time to wind down and get her mind on something else well before dusk.”

  “Sure,” Lena said.

  Delores Criswold nodded. “You’ll find her just down the corridor. Take a right, then a left. First door you come to. Just go on in. She knows you’re coming.”

  “Right, right, left,” Lena said.

  “If you get lost, Zack will show you.” Criswold nodded her head at the man at the front desk, turned, and headed down the hall.

  “Dr. Criswold?”

  She stopped.

  “What’s the problem with dusk?”

  Criswold looked at the woman buffing the floor. She moved close to Lena, her voice low. “That’s when they used to come get her. At night after supper. Just as the sun went down.”

  The sign on the door said Do Not Disturb Any Further. Lena heard voices and music. A burst of laughter. She knocked.

  No one came to the door. Probably, from the noise level, no one heard the knock. She closed her eyes for a moment, her grip easing on the canvas bag of money. She was tired. No sleep last night. Just Hayes, Hayes, pulsing in her head. And Whitney. And Kevin. And Charlie.

  Lena opened the door a crack. The music and the voices stopped.

  Rolling Ridge was not a mental institution in the sense of restraints and state auditors, but it was a residential facility for the mentally ill, and Lena regretted that the knowledge made her look more closely at the people in the room.

  There were seven of them. Four men and three women, all lounging in chairs and holding instruments. Lena saw a cello, a banjo, a violin, a guitar, a mandolin, another guitar, and a flute.

  The woman with a cello between her legs wore Mickey Mouse ears and was blowing a large pink bubble. She frowned at Lena. The bubble gum lost air and sagged onto her chin.

  “Excuse me,” Lena said. “I’m looking for Melody Hayes.”

  No one said a word. Everyone watched her.

  “I’m her.”

  A girl in a blue wheelchair with an empty IV pole looked at Lena. A violin rested in her lap. She clutched the bow tightly.

  “Lena Padget.”

  The girl stood up. The wheelchair had been a place to sit, no more.

  “Y’all go on and play,” she said to the others. “I’ll be back in a while.” None of them moved or spoke. Melody looked at Lena. “Come on with me.”

  She was slender. Skinny, actually, and no taller than five feet four, though her thinness made her seem taller. She wore heavy Levis, snug over the tiny bump of her hips, but gaping at the waist. She wore a short-sleeved knit blouse, faded pink, and her tennis shoes were cheap, dirty, and scuffed.

  Standing up, she drooped like a flower blasted by the sun. Her arms hung to her sides, the elbows dry and knobby. Her hair was brown and long, thin and wavy. Her face was tiny and heart-shaped, her chin pointed, her eyes heavily made up.

  She had a woeful, bedraggled look.

  Lena followed Melody Hayes down the hall. Behind them the room stayed silent.

  Melody headed for a door marked Exit and pushed the bar handle. Lena looked over her shoulder, half expecting someone to stop them.

  “It’s okay,” Melody Hayes said flatly. “I got the run of the place. They don’t keep us locked up or nothing.” She paused by a white concrete bench and sat down. “It’s a little damp,” she said. “Must of rained here earlier. This okay with you? We could go back in.”

  Lena sat on the bench. It was cool on the back of her jeans. “This is okay.”

  The wind blew Melody’s hair in her face, and she pushed it out of her eyes. She looked at Lena, her expression an appeal for something.

  “You sure you want to talk to me?” Lena asked.

  “It’s okay,” Melody said. “I talk all the time to Delores. I’m what you call desensitized. Or getting that way.” She leaned forward. “I wanted to come outside so nobody can hear us. I think it would be all right, but you never know. Sometimes it’s hard not to be paranoid. Everbody knows everbody, and things seem to get back to Jeff.”

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “Not seen him, exactly. But even in prison … he finds ways to let me know he’s around.”

  Lena nodded.

  “You seen him? Since prison?”

  “Last night,” Lena said.

  Melody caught her breath. “What about?”

  Lena shrugged, not wanting to give away the arrangements for Charlie. “He was strange. Wore a black overcoat, and he’d shaved his head. And he’d painted his face. In four diamond sections.”

  “White and black,” Melody said softly. “Getting ready for the big show. Practicing, probably. Did he say anything?”

  “It’s hard to remember the exact words.” Lena frowned. “Life listens, death speaks. The bread of … something, I don’t know.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He said something about a Mr. Enoch. Do you know who that is? He said Mr. Enoch is hard on lambs.”

  Melody’s face went from pink to white. “Lambs? He said lambs?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Just—” Melody took a deep breath. “That’s what his mama used to call us kids. Lambs. I went to live with them after my own mama died. I was pretty little. And my uncle Shep and aunt Lisa took me in. Shep and Lisa Hayes. My daddy couldn’t care for a kid, ’cause he worked in the mines all day. I don’t remember a lot about my mama, but she was a real good woman. I have her picture.” Melody turned away from Lena, her voice low and flat. “You should of known Jeff’s mama, though. She was something to see. Little and pretty, black curly hair. I used to love her hair. All dark and shiny and thick. She had long black eyelashes, and she wore White Shoulders perfume. Dressed real nice.”

  Melody clasped her hands tightly together, and Lena noticed thick red scars crisscrossing her wrists.

  Melody looked at Lena. “She used to call us her lambs. She had this big ole bentwood rocker. And she’d rock us, and love on us, and used to sing that song about little lambs who’s lost their way. And she told us all about these watchers that lived in the wood. And if we try to run off, they get us.”

  “Did you ever try to run away?”

  Melody nodded. “A couple times. They made me stop.”

  “How’d they do that?”

  Melody’s face was expressionless. “I had a pet goat. That’s the kind of pet you wind up with, when you live way out of town. First time I run away they said don’t, or we’ll kill Jester. But they … Something happened real bad, so I run off again. When they brung me back, they killed Jester. Cut his throat and caught the blood in a big blue bowl. Uncle Shep was doing it, but my Aunt Lisa made me hold the knife. She made Shep put his hand over mine, so I’d do it. I quit running off after that. Even though I tried not to have no more pets.”

  Melody shook her head. “Sometimes Aunt Lisa—she could be so sweet. She’d talk nice to you, and you’d want so bad to make her happy. But she was always the one to make me do the things. Things I didn’t want to. And Jeff was her boy, and she made him do things, too. But they seen real early that he was special. Later he was kind of set apart, and doing things with the grown-ups.

  “But when we were littler, me and Jeff used to be real close.” She cocked her head sideways. “They started taking us to what they call the picnics when we was about four.” She frowned. “One time in school some boy asked me to go on a family picnic, and I ’bout clawed his eyes out.”

  They were silent a long moment.

  “This was how it would go,” Melody said. “Aunt Lisa would give us our dinner first, real early. Then when Uncle Shep would come in, they’d tell us to go on out back and play. And we’d go out and play till dark.
We had an old rusty yellow swing set. Musta’ been a hundred years old, but we loved it. The slide was bent, and you had to be careful, ’cause one time Jeff cut his hand on the metal, and Aunt Lisa got real mad.

  “We’d get sticks and dig in the dirt under the swing set. Didn’t have much grass back there. And some nights they would come and get us. After supper, they’d drive us in this old green Buick. The seats were so deep down in the back, that even though I usually got set in somebody’s lap, I could hardly see out the windows.

  “There was always lots of people crammed in the car, and we got pretty hot back there, even with the windows down. Some of them people didn’t smell too good, but you could always get a sniff of Aunt Lisa’s perfume.

  “And we’d head out for the woods somewhere. State parks sometimes, or campgrounds. Maybe somebody’s farm. There was always lots of people there, and they was all busy and excited. They’d bring the altar in back of a pickup, and a whole bunch of men would have to lift it off. They had fires to start up, and people was changing clothes. Jeff and I had to stay out the way. When we got bigger they made us look for sticks and stuff to help keep the fires going.

  “But when we was real little, me and Jeff, we’d kind of go and hunker down by a tree and hope they’d forget we was there, Sometimes they’d make us go in a barn till they called us out. Me and Jeff used to get along then. We’d stay side by side, and pretend we was hiding in mine tunnels, and if we wasn’t quiet, the timbers would come crashing down.

  “But sooner or later, they’d call us in. And at first, all we had to do was watch. Listen and learn, they told us. And Jeff, he was real smart. And they saw that. And then one night they buried him alive.”

  Lena winced.

  “They’d do that to some of the kids. They did it to Jeff a bunch of times.”

  “Did they ever do that to you?”

  Melody looked at her feet. “Once they did. It was supposed to prepare you. Me and Delores talked about that. When they meant prepare a kid, what they had in mind was breaking them.

  “It was real bad for Jeff. ’Cause when we was kids, him and me, we use to have to go get locked in the shed when we was bad. Or they put us under the porch of the house, and they was lots of spiders under there. And he would have a terrible time. Breathe real hard, and cry a lot. When they saw he was special, they took him in a separate car from me, that first time, I think. And what they did was they buried him in a coffin, with some kind of a tube thing to help him breathe.”

  Melody shivered. “He wasn’t the same after that night. He quit minding being in the shed. And they let him do things—to us other kids. I would go to sleep and wake up with him standing over me, and blood all over. Then they’d let me go somewhere and sleep, and this fat lady named Mira would clean me up. And Aunt Lisa made sure our clothes covered up the cuts.”

  Lena glanced at Melody’s wrists.

  “I did those myself,” Melody said.

  “This Mira,” Lena said. “Is she still alive?”

  “I guess. I don’t go back home. But she called me a couple years ago. You believe that? Wanted me back.”

  “You remember her last name?”

  “Farley. Mira Farley. Her common-law husband was Alfred Ginty.”

  “Was he part of the group?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about your aunt? Is she still alive?”

  “No. She died when Jeff was fifteen.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t … I don’t remember.”

  “I need names, Melody. People who might still be involved with Hayes.”

  “I made you a list.” Melody dug in her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of orange construction paper. “I don’t know if all these people are still around. And I’m not sure how the names are spelled. I hope it helps.”

  “It helps.” Lena looked at Melody. “Thank you for talking to me.”

  Melody grabbed Lena’s wrist. “Just get the boy. Get him as fast as you can, and don’t give up on him. Even if it takes a long, long time. Find him. And you come back if I can help you any more.”

  Lena stood up. “I’ll let you know when I find Charlie. And I’ll let you know when I see Jeff back in jail. Which I’m planning to do.”

  Melody frowned. “Delores told me he killed your sister and her little boy.”

  “He did.”

  “Someday he’s going to kill me.”

  “No. He’s going back to jail.”

  Melody looked at her seriously. “C’mere. Show you something.”

  She got up and walked to the base of a dogwood tree. It was a mature tree, just blossoming with white flowers. Melody picked up a stick, and squatted down to dig. She scrabbled in the dirt with her fingers, making a satisfied noise, finally, and bringing something up out of the sandy soil. She blew on it, and wiped it on her shirt, and held it up for Lena to see.

  A seashell.

  31

  The Cutlass sat in the parking lot—grimy, rusty, reassuringly tacky. Lena had locked it, and it was still locked, but a piece of paper had been folded and wedged between the horn and the steering wheel.

  Someone has been in my car, she thought.

  There was something on the front seat. A tiny, blue-striped T-shirt.

  Lena unlocked the Cutlass and reached for the paper.

  RAY LAKE RECREATION AREA. CAMPSITE 49. YOU BRING ALL YOUR REASONS, AND I’LL GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT. BE THERE, TONIGHT, AT 8:30 P.M. JUST YOU AND ME. BE ON TIME OR IT’S ALL OVER BETWEEN US.

  HAPPY EASTER!!!

  Lena recognized the shirt. Little Charlie Valetta had been wearing it the night Archie had snatched him. It was crumpled now, streaked with oily black dirt. There was a smear of dark red on the neckline.

  Lena sat down hard in the front seat of the car. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  Bloodstains dried reddish brown, not red.

  Lena looked at the shirt again, scraping at the red streak with her fingernail, sniffing the sweet scent.

  Candy.

  There was a map on the front seat next to the shirt. A LaRue County map. Lena opened it up and studied it. She checked her watch. Three-thirty. Figured mileage in her head. Daylight, and trails in the woods.

  If she left right now she still might not make it.

  She remembered Hayes talking about Charlie, Easter services, and exsanguination. She’d had to look it up—exsanguinated. It had been defined as anemic. Or bloodless.

  Lena folded the map and started the car.

  She stopped at Hooper’s Gas-n-Go, and pulled to the side of the gas tanks. She opened her wallet and counted up her cash. Four dollars and seventy-eight cents.

  Lena opened the canvas bag and took out a hundred-dollar bill.

  She looked over her shoulder while she pumped gas. Was Hayes watching?

  Maybe. Maybe not. She wasn’t prepared to meet him at a lonely campsite with ninety thousand dollars in a canvas bag, and Charlie Valetta’s life dependent on the outcome. She would call Mendez.

  The pay phone was on the wall between the restrooms. An old man in baggy shorts and knee socks was headed right for it. Lena nudged him sideways and got there first.

  Lena put a quarter in. The old man edged close.

  “Private call,” Lena said coldly. She wondered why she found it so easy to be rude.

  The old man grimaced and went into the men’s room.

  Lena got a Detective Lester, who she thought she might have met at one time or another. She had the feeling she didn’t like him. He knew who she was, and told her that Mendez was meeting with Anita Casey in Louisville. He gave her the Louisville number.

  A desk officer in Louisville told her that Detective Casey was out and she didn’t know who Mendez was, and hadn’t seen him. She agreed that if she didn’t know him, she couldn’t know whether or not she’d seen him, but she was not inclined to pursue the matter.

  Lena had one more quarter. She dialed Rick’s number.

  “Judi
th? It’s Lena. Is Rick there?”

  “Sugar, he’s in Louisville. The call-back, remember?”

  “Fuck.”

  Judith sounded wary. “Lena, honey, better tell me what’s up,”

  Lena glanced over her shoulder. The guy behind the cash register kept looking her way, and smiling when he caught her eye. Lena turned her back on him.

  “I’m meeting Hayes at the Ray County Recreation Area. Campsite forty-nine. I’m making a trade.”

  Judith sounded breathless. “Where’s sweetie?”

  “Who?”

  “Mendez. Don’t tell me he’s not with you.”

  “He’s not,” Lena said, wishing her voice weren’t quite so shrill. “I can’t get him. He’s in Louisville with that bitch, Anita Casey.”

  “Cupcake, what you going to do? You want me to come?”

  “Try to get hold of Mendez for me. Maybe he can arrange something local, if he can’t get there in time.”

  “Lena, you better not.”

  “Don’t worry, Judith, I got my baseball bat.”

  “Lena—”

  “Judith, Charlie is four years old.”

  “Right. But, Lena, sugar, you got to use your smarts on this. If you could sneak up, maybe, and bash Jeff’s head in, do that, okay?”

  “Stay with the phone, Judith. Nobody but Mendez.”

  “I hear you. Go, cupcake. Break a leg.”

  Lena hung up.

  She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t stupid either, so she cruised the grocery counters, found a chicken salad sandwich, a bag of Ranch Style Fritos, and a giant Tootsie Roll. She grabbed a can of Coke, a package of new batteries for the flashlight that she hoped was in the trunk of the Cutlass, and pulled out her hundred-dollar bill.

  The clerk looked it over carefully.

  “You wanna pay for this candy bar with a hundred?”

  “Not just the candy bar. The sandwich, the chips, the Coke, the batteries, and the gas on pump nine.”

  The woman in line behind her pursed her lips. “The gas alone ought to do it.”

  32

  It was cool, too cool, now the sun was sliding away. A brown wooden sign with yellow lettering pointed the way to campsite 49. Lena bent over a water pump, rinsing and refilling the empty can of Coke. Water splashed over the side of the can, getting her sleeve wet and drenching the top of her shoe. The Tootsie Roll crackled in her pocket. She tucked the flashlight under her arm, hefted the baseball bat, and headed down the trail.