by Ninie Hammon
Charlie.
Sam’s head snapped up and she saw the rifle lying on the roadside. Charlie and Abby were gone.
“… they went down toward the river,” he said, his voice breathless from the pain.
She held the end of the ACE bandage to his abdomen and wrapped it once around his body to hold the wadded-up fabric bandages in place, then she shoved the remainder of the roll into his left hand and placed it over the piece of fabric in the wound in his side.
“Press here. Hard. Keep pressure on it and don’t let go.”
Then she got to her feet and ran past the rifle on the ground to the top of the embankment, calling out for Charlie.
A voice came up to her from the darkness below, along with the sound of somebody scrambling up through the bushes and over the rocks.
“… into the river,” were the first discernible words, but the voice was Charlie’s and that’s what Sam had so desperately wanted to know. “I was right behind her and I hit the water. She had to have gone in.” Charlie emerged from the dark bushes and raced toward Sam. Her pajama pants were muddy up almost to the knee. Her robe was untied and flapping around her.
A random thought rode a single synapse through her brain — Charlie’s hair was perfect, looked just like Princess Diana — and then was gone.
“… Malachi hurt bad?”
Charlie brushed past her to Malachi, looked down at him, then back up at Sam.
“Abby went into the river so she must have washed downstream into the Jabberwock. She has the key to the kiln in her pocket. I have to get that key.”
Her voice got higher and more hysterical with every word. “Merrie’s in the kiln. That monster put her in the kiln and shut the door!” She looked at her watch and squeaked out an aborted scream. “It’s three thirty-two. Merrie’s only got enough air to last until three forty-five — that’s thirteen minutes and it takes twenty minutes to drive—” She cut herself off, cried out hysterically, “No!”
She clamped her jaw shut, ground her teeth, spoke with words wrapped in iron control.
“No, that’s an hour and she has more time than that. There’s enough air for an hour and a half. There is! Until 4:15.” Charlie was hanging onto her emotions with her fingernails, fighting hysteria. “Maybe longer, another …” She pulled in air and a sob rode with it. “I’ve got forty-three minutes! Merrie will die in—”
“Pull me up,” Malachi spoke from below them and they looked down at him. He was trying to rise.
“Malachi, don’t,” Sam said. “You shouldn’t—”
He grabbed Sam’s restraining hand. His voice was gruff. “Pull me up!”
She pulled him up.
“Sam, you need to go to the bus shelter and get that key out of Abby’s pocket and take it to Charlie’s,” Malachi said. Sam just looked at him, her understanding lagging a beat or two behind his words. “Go now!” He was standing now, bent in pain at the waist but holding the roll of ACE bandage in place. “Charlie and I’ll go to her house and see if we can find some other way to get the door open.” Sam only paused for a beat, was turning toward her car as he urged her to “Hurry.”
She called over her shoulder as she ran, “Roll that bandage around and around tight.”
Then she was in her car, wheeling it around in the middle of the road like a Nascar driver and racing off into the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was a good thing Malachi was doing the thinking because Charlie didn’t seem to be able to. She was totally consumed by the monster imperative: Get Merrie out of the kiln! She could hear only that, banging around in her head, blotting out all other sound or thought.
After he instructed Sam to go to the bus shelter, he grabbed hold of her arm.
“Help me to your car.”
She didn’t question. Just wrapped his arm around her shoulder and helped him walk to her car.
When Sam wheeled her car around in a skidding turn and raced away into the night, the action freed Charlie from some kind of trance. Suddenly, she no longer felt like her thoughts were wrapped in cotton, her actions lagging behind her volition. She was absolutely here and now, totally present. Could smell the river on her clothes, was aware of the pebbly asphalt on the bottom of her bare feet and the weight of the man leaning against her.
She got the door open and helped Malachi inside. Then she bolted around the car and jumped into the driver’s seat, started the car as Malachi began to wrap the ACE bandage around and around his abdomen. Then she turned the car around and pointed it back into Nowhere County and sped away into the worst hours of her entire life.
The drive from the county line down Route 17 to Barber’s Mill Road, and then down that to her mother’s house, took only seconds. Seconds that were hours long. Charlie was not aware of the passage of time or of driving the car or what Malachi was saying, and he was saying something.
She’d blinked when she got behind the wheel. And when she blinked again, she was careening into the driveway of her mother’s house and it wasn’t likely she’d ever remember anything about the time in between.
She slammed the transmission into park, leapt out of the car, leaving the door open and the engine running.
From the car to the back gate.
Through the back gate into the unlit backyard, where a hammer slammed into her chest. The kiln was a puddle of deeper darkness just beyond the side door of the garage, but even with only the light of the full moon, she could see it well enough to know that the door on it was closed.
She took one step and she was standing in front of it. She took one breath, then reached out and grabbed the cold metal handle and yanked on it with every ounce of strength in her body. It didn’t move. The door wasn’t just closed. It was locked.
Almost the whole backyard was dirt, her mother’s unplanted vegetable garden. But there was a slice of grass beside the garage all the way to the gate that probably hadn’t been mowed since … You could see an indentation in the tall grass in front of the kiln where the door had been opened, had swung out across the grass and bent it down. In fact, several blades of grass had been caught in the door when it closed and were now stuck there.
She might have started sobbing then. She knew she was making some kind of sound, but she couldn’t hear it.
There was a slab of concrete in front of the side garage door and a small roof jutting out from the building over it with an overhead light, though no sidewalk attached the side door of the garage to the screened-in porch on the back of the house.
She flung open the garage door and slammed her hand on the light switch on the inside wall beside it and stepped inside. The dim florescent in the ceiling flickered a time or two, then remained on. It cast a paltry glow through the big dusty-smelling enclosure, but it was enough light to see the ten-penny nail in the wall behind the door.
The nail was bare.
Some part of her mind registered that it was only recently bare, too. She’d noted when she’d gone looking for duct tape to seal up boxes that the garage was so coated with dusty cobwebs she’d need a face mask if she moved anything or the dust would ignite a brushfire in her allergies.
The rest of the garage was still enshrouded in cobwebs. But there were no cobwebs around that nail now.
She gasped a strangled sob, her hands flew to her mouth and she actually staggered backward a step.
Oh, dear God in heaven it was true.
This was real.
Somehow on the drive from the county line that never happened, she had managed to convince herself it was a bluff. Abby hadn’t really locked a three-year-old child in an airless kiln and stolen the only key. Nobody was that kind of monster.
She’d put the child in the kiln, laid her on the piece of Mama’s new carpet, but left the door open a crack, just enough to let in air.
Or she had closed the door, but left it unlocked.
Or she’d locked it, but put the key back on the nail.
Reality was a thing too hateful to co
untenance. Abby Clayton hadn’t been bluffing. She had done exactly what she’d said. She’d used the key on the nail to unlock the kiln and opened the door — you could see the impression in the grass. She’d seen how full it was, that there was barely any room … but still she had put Merrie inside, closed and locked the door and dropped the key — the one “danglin’ on that old rabbit’s foot fob with that other little bitty key and the big ole door key that likely don’t open nothing” into her pocket.
Now Abby was gone. And the key in her pocket was the only way to open the kiln.
Charlie looked at her watch. Three fifty-six. Nineteen minutes.
Sam went roaring into the parking lot of the Dollar General Store so fast if any of the handful of people there had been in her way, she’d have run them down.
The lights the fire department had set up were still turned on, bleaching the color out of the world. She threw the car into park and leapt out, her head on a swivel, her eyes searching. Liam Montgomery was there. He must have gone home and changed out of his uniform because he was wearing street clothes now. When she ran across the lot to the bus shelter he followed her there.
“What’s goin’—?”
No way to tell him now. No time.
“Where’s Abby?”
“Abby Clayton?”
“Of course, Abby Clayton. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She’s not here.”
The words punched a hole in Sam’s belly, the blow almost physical.
“Not here?”
“She was here earlier. You know that. After you took Charlie home, you came back and—”
“Not then. I’m not talking about then. Where is she now?”
Sam raced out into the center of the lot, looking for something that had no place to hide. The asphalt was still wet. Somebody’d been hosing it down because there was no smell of any kind now. Roscoe Tungate and his brother Harry were still here.
Harry Tungate approached her.
“You find her?” he asked. “You find Abby?”
“No, she’s here somewhere.” That was irrational, because it was clear Abby Clayton was not there. “She has to be.”
“Why do you think she’s—?”
“She went through the Jabberwock twenty minutes ago.”
It might not even have been that long. Sam had flown down Route 17 from the county line to the Middle of Nowhere. Without having to turn off on Barber’s Mill Road, that wound its slow way through the hollow to Charlie’s mother’s house at the base of Little Bear Mountain, it was a straight shot.
The Jabberwock should have deposited Abby here long before …
But had Abby actually gone through the Jabberwock? Charlie had said she was in the river. The current would have washed her downstream and it was only about thirty, maybe forty feet to the Jabberwock. But had she somehow avoided it? Had she …
Sam was grasping at straws.
… hidden in the bushes in the darkness and Charlie hadn’t seen her?
Or did she somehow swim against the current? The river was narrow and deep there, the curve had washed away the outside edge, making a hole a little past the Jabberwock so deep kids sometimes went there to go swimming. The water at the river’s edge was only about a foot deep, but would have been three or four feet deep within a few feet from the shore. Had Abby somehow managed to fight that current, in the dark, and swim upstream?
Why would she do that?
What she wanted — all she wanted — was in the opposite direction. Abby wanted to get out of the county, go get her baby. It’d make no sense for her to swim the other way.
But clearly she had gone somewhere because she wasn’t here.
Sam hadn’t been allowing herself to consider the ramifications of that, but she did now and the reality slammed like a wrecking ball into her chest.
Without the key in Abby’s pocket, Charlie’s little girl would die.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Charlie didn’t know how much time she had spent banging her fists on the closed kiln door and screaming before Malachi took her by the shoulders and pulled her away. When he did, she turned into his arms and sobbed, great heaving, wrenching sobs that rose from the core of her being and tore her open as they exploded out of her.
Her baby was locked up in there. In that tomb, that stone sarcophagus. There was no air in the tomb and without air, her baby would die.
She found herself screaming again at the thought, but Malachi just held her while she did, held her when her knees folded up beneath her and she sank to the ground and he eased himself down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.
Then her head snapped up.
She looked at her watch.
“It’s 4:01. Sam’s at the bus shelter by now, surely. It takes less than twenty minutes to get from the county line to the Middle of Nowhere.”
“I’m sure she’s been there and gone by now.”
“On her way here — right! How long can it take to get a key out of a pocket?”
“If she’s driving anything like the way she drove when I was with her, she’ll come skidding into that driveway any second now.”
“Any second.” Charlie looked at her watch again. “Yeah, any second.”
She held onto the hope in those words, clinging to that tiny piece of driftwood in a hurricane-tossed sea.
“And there’s still fourteen minutes — and maybe more. We don’t know for sure.” Charlie recited aloud the math she’d been figuring and refiguring in her head again and again. Length times width times height divided by twenty-seven … Abby’d said by thirty, but Charlie used twenty-seven. Six feet by six feet by six feet was 216 square feet, divided by twenty-seven was eight. Empty, there was almost eight cubic yards of air inside the kiln. Merrie could sleep peacefully in there all night. But the kiln wasn’t empty; it was almost full — of stuff. Boxes of pots, cups, bowls, vases, ashtrays — pottery. There were sacks of powdered clay, boxes of tools, a potter’s wheel, Christmas decorations — maybe the artificial tree, too. And a stack of carpet rolls! All that stuff was taking up space, reducing the amount of air inside the kiln, air Merrie needed to breathe.
Charlie looked at her watch again. How could five minutes have passed? It wasn’t a digital watch and she could almost see the hands spinning around and around, faster and faster and—
Less than ten minutes.
“Could we pick the lock?” She said the words as she was thinking them, then scrambled to her feet, buoyed up by the hope that had swelled inside her like pulling the cord on a Navy dinghy. “We could! How? How do you pick a lock? But it can be done. You can use … what do you use? Something small, a piece of wire.”
She knew she was babbling and could tell from the look on Malachi’s face that he didn’t for a moment believe it would work. But it would. He’d see. They’d pick the lock and get the door open before Sam even got here with the key.
“I’ll find some wire to use.”
She turned and ran into the garage, looking at everything at the same time, which amounted to looking at nothing at all. She had to focus, but there was precious little to focus on. Unlike the basement that she’d glanced into last night, the garage wasn’t filled with leftover whatever, the flotsam and jetsam of a life that her mother didn’t need anymore. The rows of shelving that once held pottery were now weighed down, stacked three and four deep, with hundreds of Mason jars where her mother had canned the vegetables she grew in her garden. The best of the pottery that’d once sat there was stored now in boxes in the kiln!
The workbench didn’t have tools on it. A couple of flower pots sat on the far end. Some plastic vases from the flowers she or her sister sent to their mother on Mother’s Day took up dusty residence beside a small bag of plant food, two rusty buckets and a washtub. There was nothing in the garage smaller than a screwdriver. There was no hammer of any kind, any size.
The space where her mother once had conducted ceramics classes was empty, the tables and benc
hes gone. A wheelbarrow with a flat tire leaned up against the wall resting on its handles. Garden implements — rakes, hoes, shears, hand spades and an ancient pair of cotton gloves — hung from nails on the wall. There were bicycle racks where she and her sister must have kept their bikes but she had no memory of that. The big bay door was shut. If she needed more light she could pull it up. She’d left the car headlights on, but more light wouldn’t help her find what wasn’t there.
She turned around and headed back outside, on her way to the kitchen to search the house for—
“I don’t think trying to pick the lock is a good idea,” Malachi said, and some small part of her registered that he was bent over slightly, using his left elbow to press on the top of the bandage in the bullet wound in his side. Bullet wound. Abby’d shot him!
Then the thought and concern were gone.
“Why not?”
“Because we could damage the lock, digging around inside it with the wrong tools, no clue what we’re doing. We could bend something, scratch something, knock something out of place so when Sam gets here with the key, it won’t work.”
He was absolutely right, of course. What was she thinking? They didn’t dare fool with the lock.
Charlie looked at her watch and wanted to scream. It was like some cartoon watch where the second and minute hands spun around and around, trailing the hour hand along with them. It was 4:10. Five minutes left.
“I did the math in my head, but maybe I did it wrong. My mind’s too … help me figure …”
She didn’t have to tell him what math. He’d grown up around coal mining same as she had. He looked at the building.
“Six feet square … that’s six by six …”
He continued to figure. Came up with the same numbers she had — eight hours if it were empty.
“But it’s not empty.”
“What’s in—?”
“Stuff. Junk. Boxes. Storage. I haven’t looked in it in years.”
“How much stuff? How much space was left?”
