“So why’s my father say she was murdered?”
Dave’s expression didn’t change but he settled back on his feet, and the slight adjustment in his body language let Shad know he felt a touch embarrassed. Not for himself, but for Pa. You had to have been around Dave Fox for most of your life in order to pick up on little things like that, and even then you wouldn’t know what it really meant.
“She had a scratch on her cheek,” Dave said. “He takes it to mean she was attacked.”
Shad searched the deputy’s face and came up empty. “And you do too?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you didn’t.” Dave made you fight for everything, but his silence still gave him away occasionally. It was one way he could stay true to himself and still let people know what was on his mind. “Doc never cared much for moon, he’s more of a Jack Daniel’s drinker. I’d come across him on the lower banks while I was hauling whiskey, out cold with his feet in the water.”
“He’s got bunions.”
“I’d stop and pick him up, drive him home before he floated off. His wife always tried to pay me forty dollars when I’d bring him inside. I’m not sure how she arrived at that price.”
Telling Dave pretty much what he thought of old Doc without having to come right out with it.
But Dave Fox would never talk out against someone in authority, not even against the sheriff, who everyone knew was on the take. He drew his line in the sand and kicked the shit out of everybody to one side and let everyone on the other side slide.
“Who found her?” Shad asked.
“I did. She was lying there, like I said, as if she were sleeping.”
“What made you think to look all the way out here?”
“I looked everywhere. I started when your father called at about ten o’clock or so, and discovered her at four-fifteen in the morning.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“No.”
Shad thought about his sister so far from town, in the night, alone, surrounded by darkness. How different would it have played out if he’d been home? Maybe the same, except he would’ve been the one to find her.
He could imagine himself there beside her. Hear himself groaning, cradling her, kneeling in the dirt with her body in his arms. His breath hitched until he was almost snorting. His hands clasped into fists as if he were trying to grab hold of her, there on the ground, and pull her back toward him.
He started to walk up the road and Dave fell in line beside him. They worked their way toward high ground that was dense with oak and heavy underbrush. Farther off, near the ridge, the willows loomed and swayed in the crosswinds.
He’d missed too much in the two years he was gone, and it was hobbling him. There would’ve been more boys around, a part-time job, other activities. He didn’t know Megan well enough anymore, and nobody was filling him in.
“She was seventeen,” he said. “She wouldn’t have come up this way alone.”
“I talked to her friends, classmates, and the closest neighbors. They all said she wasn’t seeing anyone. Had no beau. Did she ever write you and say different?”
“No. She never wrote me. I told her not to.”
“Why?”
“It would’ve only made it harder.”
The closest neighbors were more than a mile off through the fields in any direction from Pa’s house. They wouldn’t know anything. Who were the girls she used to be friendly with? He couldn’t remember.
“Maybe a new boy,” Shad said.
“If so, nobody ever saw them together.”
“A party?”
“I checked with all the parents. No one was gone for the night. No parties. One of the kids would’ve mentioned it.”
“A bonfire that night? In the fields?”
“No signs of one at all. No fresh tire tracks, no ashes, no trash. Somebody would’ve said something.”
“Even if they were trying to hide her death?”
With a slow, heavy breath Dave tried to reach out with his own will and composure and calm Shad down. “What group of teenagers can keep their mouths shut about anything?”
None. Shad realized it but was already grasping for whatever he could. In the can, locked down with assholes and killers everywhere, he never lost his confidence or ease. Now, standing here, he knew he was shaking apart inside. It was almost enough to scare him, but not quite.
“Was she raped?”
“No. There was no indication of a struggle.”
“Did you . . . ?”
“You need to stop acting like a private eye, Shad Jenkins. You’re not very good at it. Stop asking so many questions.”
“You’re right,” Shad admitted, “but it’s not going to happen. Did you talk to Zeke Hester?”
“He was in Dober’s Roadhouse, same as every night. Drunk and causing his usual misfortunes and woe. Had one altercation with the bartender, threw a pool cue across the room.”
“He likes throwing things. The day I broke his arm he took off his boot and hurled it at my face.”
“He’s a sniveler, but twenty witnesses put him there until closing at two A.M. His mother says he got home quarter after. He tripped over her loom and busted her paint-by-numbers picture of Elvis and Jesus smiling on a cloud.”
“Not Conway Twitty?”
“I know Elvis when I see him. So Old Lady Hester hit Zeke with an iron skillet and he passed out on the living room rug. And she’s not covering for him. His mama hates him even more than you do.”
“Maybe.”
Mags’s hand, waving to him from the corner of his eye, snagged his attention. If he turned his head, he’d lose her, so he froze, kept her in frame. Dave kept going for another yard, then stopped and looked at him. Shad tried to inspect her nails, see if they were broken or caked with grime, maybe somebody’s skin.
It took a few seconds to slip into the shrouded, quiet place inside himself where he could handle whatever life threw at him. He couldn’t get all the way there, but the effort helped, even as Megan’s fingers flitted at the edges of his vision. Her hand looked clean. She drew it away.
Much calmer now, he asked, “Anything else out there? In those woods?”
“Not nearby. A few overgrown logging paths that lead to the old McMueller Mill. It’s only ruins now, even the stream has dried up. Some stunted orchards, I think. I’m not really sure.”
“Who lives over that way?”
“A few of the bottom hill families on the other side of the gorge. They stick to themselves, hardly ever come down into town. The Taskers. The Johansens. And the Gabriels too, as I recall. They have their own community, sort of an extended village up there near the briar woods. They’re snake handlers, way I hear tell.”
“I don’t know any of them.”
“I’ve met a couple and run into them now and again, but they keep their church goings-on to themselves. No phone among the bunch of them. Never cause any trouble. Red Sublett and his brood dwell nearby there, but he’s not a part of their camp. He’s got nine kids now. No wonder he looks half-dead when he comes in for supplies.”
Shad thought of Red’s wife, Lottie, hangdog and toothless, and he had to control a shudder from going through him. “Goddamn, he only had five when I went in.”
“He got himself a set of premature quadruplets last year. All of them with club feet and stunted legs, and none with the correct amount of fingers. That Lottie, she’s pushing them out too damn fast.”
Shad didn’t say aloud what they both already knew, that Red and Lottie were siblings though they usually denied it, but not always. Doing whatever they wanted to do, not out of love or even a fundamental need, but simply because of proximity. What a foolish reason to visit sins upon your babies.
He thought of Tandy Mae’s children, who were Megan’s deformed half brothers and half sisters, and so, somehow related to him by the narrow channels of blood.
“My grandfather used to tell me these hills were haunted,” Dave to
ld him.
The woods thickened with ash and birch and more slash pine, the land wild with sprawled logs and lightning-struck trunks clotted with weeds. Tangled briars, rosebay, Catawba, and rhododendron and dogwood knotted in mad, awkward patterns. Shad sighted areas of bark scarred with bullet holes and buckshot. There were flashes of light winking in the brush, reflections from beer cans and broken jugs of moon.
“Maybe they are,” Shad said. It was true, at least for today. Megan, or something, wanted his pledge.
So now they were down to it. The milieu fluctuated a little, Dave taking full control again without having to do a damn thing.
“I don’t want you to cause any trouble out this way, Shad Jenkins.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“You’re a god-awful liar.”
“I have to find out what happened to her.”
“That’s my job.” Voice firm, putting some bite into it. “Leave this to me.”
It was Dave Fox’s way of saying, no matter what the official report might read, that he would never give up on the case, he’d work it until the truth finally broke free.
“Let’s go up there for a few minutes.”
“Where?”
“Top of Jonah Ridge,” Shad said.
“The hell for?”
“I want to take a look.”
Dave pulled a face that only cops knew how to make—like he was dealing with a wiseass brat and ready to visit great injury upon that kid any second. But he obliged, willing to give Shad just a little more slack.
They walked back to the patrol car and drove up the Gospel Trail. The expanse broke into numerous dirt paths leading into the thickets and scrub tilting away from the rise. A split-rail fence had been put up to keep people from wandering off the edge.
The Chatalaha had, by its scouring violence, formed one of the most rugged chasms for hundreds of miles in any direction. The steep walls of the gorge enclosed the river for almost fifteen miles, clear up to Poverhoe. On the other side of the ravine, the terrain grew extremely steep and rugged, covered by a dense hardwood forest.
They got out. Dave Fox showed no sign of tension, but Shad sensed he was getting antsy, wasting so much time talking, driving around, being idle, catering to a civilian. Shad did his best to ignore it.
The fence was weak and he could see black mold growing in the middle of the rotted slats. An ounce of pressure would send it over, and he could just imagine the rail giving away as he pressed his stomach to it, easing forward inch by inch, until he was plunging. Dave’s powerful arm struck out and braced him.
“How far up are we?”
“Elevation averages about thirty-four hundred feet along the rim of the gorge,” Dave said.
“Jesus—”
“Waters descend over two thousand feet before breaking into the open levels of the hollow. Jonah Ridge is on the other side of the chasm. My grandfather used to hunt grizzly and cougar up there.”
“Even though he thought the hills were haunted?”
“He was a man of contradictions.”
All of us are. You couldn’t get away from it.
“Anybody live out that way?”
That tremendous torso filled with cold air, working like a bellows. Dave gave him that same look as before, sad and almost loving, but ready to backhand him hard across his nose if need be. “You going to hunt down everybody for a twenty-mile radius, Shad Jenkins?”
“If I have to.”
“You’re gonna cause yourself a lot of pain. That the way you gonna go at this?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s mostly wilderness on Jonah. The grizzly and the big cats were wiped out. Now you’ve really only got deer, grouse, quail, and coon. Living off red chokeberry and wild indigo, they don’t get as big as you might think. Plenty of timber rattlers too, in case you decide to go take a gander. Get yourself some real boots. They’ll strike through the heels of what you’re wearing and you’ll probably be dead in two hours without treatment.”
It was an exaggeration. Probably. “How much farther up is the trestle that covers the divide?”
“Maybe a mile. It’s hidden from our line of view right now by the scrub and pine. The Pharisee Bridge. They were pure brimstone with naming things in these parts, weren’t they?”
“They do appear to have been single-minded people back then.”
“And some of their inheritors still can be.”
“I suppose we can.”
“The trestle was never the most stable structure, but the county used it for fifteen, twenty years or so beginning in the late thirties. They tried a couple of mining operations up there on Jonah but nothing ever came of it, and the tracks were abandoned and pulled up. Now the hill folk use the bridge to cut their trips to town in half, when they come down at all. Which happens less and less now. Nobody else would dare try it, not even the hunters. Easier and safer just to cross the Chatalaha at the bottom and drive up the old logging roads.”
Shad stepped back over to the rickety rail fence and forced himself to stand there. To show whoever was pondering on him that he wasn’t going to lie still or back off. He was coming.
He scanned the vista on the other side of the gorge, the dying orchards clustered with snarled catclaw brambles and briars.
A scratch on her cheek.
Pharisee.
If somebody hadn’t taken Megan up to Gospel Trail Road, then maybe someone had brought her down from the back hills instead.
Chapter Five
THE LUVELL GIRL HIS FATHER HAD SPOKEN OF turned out to be Glide, who after dropping out of school in the fifth grade spent most of her days helping make sour-mash whiskey. She was a year younger than Megan—than Megan had been—but Glide already had 36C breasts and a natural cunning and understanding of men. Like her mother and sisters before her, she was built to bear children, designed by the hollow to pass on the burden of her general simplemindedness.
Shad remembered her as a crude kid always pouting and posturing, smelling of fresh cornstalk. She’d grown into a provocative teenager aware of her sexuality but too immature to do more than stick her chest in your face. She managed to hit all the right poses that accentuated her heavily freckled cleavage.
The Luvells had come out of the bottoms only to develop a taste for their own moon. Their patriarch, Pike Luvell, had blown himself up after drunkenly stuffing five sticks of dynamite in a chuckhole chasing down a gopher. His two sons were in various stages of chronic alcoholism. Instead of selling their moon they often never even finished distilling it, choosing to sit around their rock-strewn farm and eat the mash gruel.
It was an ugly sight. Neither of them had a tooth left in his skull. The oldest, Venn, was totally addled and rarely bothered to leave the barn. The younger, Hoober, yellow-tinged and bloated from failing kidneys, was a couple of years older than Shad and had reached the final stages of cirrhosis.
Their place crouched out on Bogan Road, nestled between a frog pond and a few acres of wire grass. Four shacks covered in crow shit faced one another.
Glide had a small potbelly but Shad couldn’t tell if it was baby fat or if she was already pregnant. He made his guess as she kept on affecting mannerisms that would drive the guys at Dober’s Roadhouse out of their heads. Shad hadn’t had a woman for two years, yet he was somehow disheartened by the display.
It gave him pause. He was struck again by the alarming fact that he now understood C-Block murderers better than he did his own people.
Glide lived up to her name, swirling around Shad as she sleekly eddied about the yard, working the vats of bubbling mash. He could see the bottom of Venn’s boots sticking out from beneath a thatch of hay in the corner of the barn. Broken pottery and mason jars littered the ground, half-hidden by tufts of crabgrass. Twisted lengths of converted radiator tubing connected the metal barrels and lay piled here and there among dried shucks of corn.
It sickened him thinking of how Mags must’ve walked around here, viewing this scene of despondency. Did sh
e ever gaze into Hoober’s slack-jawed empty maw and listen to those befuddled slurrings? See Venn crawling around consuming his gruel? Could Shad have saved her from that at least?
He had to keep turning to watch Glide as she spun and circled the steaming drums. He wondered if he’d ever be able to drink whiskey again.
Glide stayed in motion, wriggling, the little belly quivering as she kept up a constant stream of chatter. Asking him ridiculous questions but showing a real curiosity. Wanting to know about the food they served in prison, the size of the cells, and if he’d gotten any jailhouse tattoos. If anybody had taught him how to break into a bank vault. She didn’t expect any responses, didn’t actually seem to need them. But it proved she kept her mind busy.
As she flowed closer to him, her shirt lifted, and he spotted a sloppy tattoo of a bumblebee on her left hip. Slightly below it, toward the base of her spine, a warm red devil face smiled affectionately. The needle hadn’t been clean and the tats had scarred considerably.
He stood waiting for her to wind down, and when she didn’t, he stepped over, got in front, and put a hand on her shoulder. It stopped her as if she’d run into a wall. She looked up, puzzled.
“Was Megan seeing anybody?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
It got depressing, having to explain every word you said. “A boy. Did she have a boyfriend?”
“No, nobody like that.”
“You certain?”
“A’course. After the trouble with that Zeke Hester bastard, she never wanted much to do with the boys. Except some in the Youth Ministry. She thought they were all right ’cause they didn’t do much ’sides go to prayer meetings.”
“Know of anyone who would’ve wanted to do her harm?”
“No, a’course not.”
“Think about it before you answer,” he snapped.
She blinked at him, tongued the inside of her cheek, and let a few beats go by. “Everybody liked Megan. And Zeke stayed away.”
He knew Glide was answering him marginally but honestly, and she wouldn’t offer anything more than what was simplest and fastest to say.
He had to come at it a different way. “Did you ever go up there in the back hills with her?”
November Mourns Page 5
