by Ben Farthing
“I recommend you get off your daddy’s porch before he throws you off. A man don’t take kindly to anyone pointing a gun at his wife.”
The door opened. Mom’s face appeared. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Mascara clumped in her wrinkles. She looked at Cessy, at her own feet, then at Sheriff Miller. “Like we said. Any other way and it’ll be trouble.” She choked back a sob. Looked at Cessy. “I really thought you would--”
“That’s enough,” ordered Sheriff Miller.
“One more chance to tell me what’s going on, Mom,” said Cessy. “Where’s Kate? Did Sheriff Miller come and march her off, too?”
The old man’s elbow slammed into Cessy’s sternum. She staggered backwards, reached the end of the porch, and fell three steps onto the ground.
“Reggie!” Mom screamed. “What are you doing?”
Cessy’s tailbone screamed in pain. The wound in her stomach spurted blood.
“Million apologies.” Sheriff Miller moseyed down the stairs to help Cessy up. “I turned around too quick and didn’t see you there.”
Cessy bit her lip and evaluated the pain. Nothing felt broken. Although, the impact had jarred her spine.
“Reggie,” Mom hissed, “we asked you to deal with this, not abuse our daughter.”
“Vermin’s vermin.”
Mom drew back, eyes wide. “Don’t you call my Cecilia like that.” She looked over her shoulder, at the house. “Don’t even suggest as much.”
Sheriff Miller puffed out his chest. “I’m always open to advice from friends, but at the end of the day,” he tapped the badge on his chest, “I decide who to arrest around here.”
“You’re right, you’re our friend, Reggie. I’m asking you as a friend. You owe us. There’s a lot more full bellies around here because of me and Rusty.”
Sheriff Miller glared, sighed, then relaxed his shoulders. “Alright.” He pushed Cessy toward his squad car, a fifteen-year-old Ford Explorer.
Cessy dragged her feet. She looked over her shoulder at Mom. “What does he owe you? Is this something to do with Kate?”
Mom went back inside. The door shut, leaving Cessy alone with her teenage boogeyman.
“It’s got nothing to do with Kate, or you, or anyone else who abandoned Hamlin,” growled Sheriff Miller.
“Then what is it?”
“Cecilia Miller, you’re under arrest for brandishing a firearm.” The old man opened the back door of his car, reciting her rights.
Cessy climbed inside, mumbling along.
Sheriff Miller leaned over her to buckle her in. “Still a smartass.” His breath smelled like Lifesavers mints and old dirt. He got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Makes me feel less guilty for spinning the truth to your mother. I’m afraid I can’t honor her wishes for you. The town wouldn’t stand for it.”
The radio cut on. The angry host that her parents had been listening to yelled from the speakers.
Cessy watched Sheriff Miller through the rearview mirror.
Hamlin’s reelected sheriff from better days gone by pulled the car onto the road, eyes devoid of compassion.
She had a feeling she wouldn’t get a chance to call her lawyer.
23
Cessy’s gut pulsed under her hand. She held pressure to the wound she’d given herself. The blood slowly clotted.
It dripped onto the backseat of Sheriff Miller’s Trailblazer.
Sheriff Miller hummed to himself in the driver’s seat. He’d turned on the same talkshow that apparently haunted every radio in Hamlin.
“That’s how we’ll know who’s vermin and who’s not. Bring what you can tomorrow. It’ll be a lunch to remember.”
He sped up through the neighborhood. The Trailblazer’s raspy engine drowned out the radio.
Cessy thought of being under her parents’ house, hearing the ranting morph into howling. She looked out the window, down the river bank to the rippling water. Kate was still out there somewhere. Getting arrested would slow Cessy’s finding her sister. She wanted to scream, to burst out of her handcuffs, to break Sheriff Miller’s brittle bones so she could go to Kate. Interrogate Valerie again.
Search the mine for a corpse, if it came to that.
But Sheriff Miller was happily humming, which sent Cessy’s internal alarm blaring.
Sheriff Miller should be furious right now. Hamlin was a small town, but the job was similar enough to hers that the old man was about to be smothered under a mountain of paperwork. In a town this size, probably more than any other day of the year. Sheriff Miller was a get-your-hands-dirty good ol’ boy--not someone who enjoyed desk work. He should be grumbling about this arrest, and the legal and public relations headache that would follow from arresting a fellow cop.
He shouldn’t be humming happy country songs.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“We’ve taken this ride before,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”
“It’s been twenty years. Some of those rides ended at the sheriff’s station, with me in a cell. I remember a couple ended up in an alley, you watching over while I scrubbed off graffiti--one of those times wasn’t me, by the way.” Cessy remembered one more destination, after the incident that nearly had her thrown out of town. She opened her mouth, then shut it.
“Oh ho,” Sheriff Miller laughed. “You remember.”
He pulled out of the Rooster Estates neighborhood, and turned right onto Mud River Road, away from town. On the smoother road, the radio host’s opponentless arguments came through more clearly.
“...can’t trust them. They used to mark themselves by where they lived. Not anymore...”
They passed the turn which would take them up to the Church of the Morningstar. Instead, Sheriff Miller drove another quarter mile, until an orange and white “Road Closed” barrier appeared around a corner.
Before reaching the barrier, he turned onto a road with a missing street sign, paved but neglected so it was more cracks than asphalt. The Trailblazer’s creaky shocks drowned out the radio host.
Ahead, the road curved up into the trees.
In the woods on either side, RVs and campers, long abandoned and grown over. This used to be the dirt poor corner of town, called Rag Hill for the clothes of the occupants, the state of their homes, and the appearance of sagging vines which in autumn caught dead leaves like a net.
A few families had owned Rag Hill since before the mine came, and they watched stubbornly as other folks moved in to work the mine. When the mine brought money to Hamlin, the families here scraped by. Old houses fell apart without funds for repairs. They were replaced with RVs scavenged from junkyards.
An odd effect of the mine collapse: all housing dropped in value. The poorest apartments for rent dropped so low that the families up here could afford to move out of their RVs and into real housing. Except a handful, like Marissa Davies’ parents.
“Why are we here?” Cessy asked. “Rubbing my face in the same old mistake?”
The Trailblazer bumped across a rut in the road. Cessy winced at the jolt to her gut.
Sheriff Miller pointed into the trees. A rusty generator beneath a thick willow oak. “That’s where the Davies’ camper was set up. Chuck and Paulina moved down to the apartments on Third Street, after the business with Marissa.”
“Are they still there?” asked Cessy.
He braked. Looked over his shoulder at Cessy. His compassionless eyes discovered disdain. “That’s what you ask? Are Marissa’s folks still in their apartment? You don’t got any other questions? Anything else you’d like to say?”
“Not to you. Not about Marissa.” She’d written a letter for the Davies, fifteen years ago, and given it to Mom to give to them. She never followed up to see if she had, or if they had any response.
Sheriff Miller continued up the hill. “Your momma sees you through rose colored glasses. Police officer must be an easy job in the big city, because you’re still the same angry brat you ever was.”
“You want me to make
a show of how guilty I feel? That’s why we’re coming up here? So I can get out of the car and fall to my knees and beg the Lord for forgiveness?”
“Your personal salvation is your own responsibility. My responsibility is to my friends in this town.”
They turned a corner, and there it was.
Maul Rock.
A twelve-foot-high rock formation made from some unlikely pattern of decay. So named for its resemblance to the primitive weapon, bulk on top, a thinner base holding it up. Cessy had always thought it was shaped more like an over-loaded ice cream cone.
It jutted up from a larger rock formation on the side of the hill, overlooking a twenty-foot drop. It was never an overlook for Hamlin, because the surrounding trees easily cut off the view.
Cessy’s chief memory of Maul Rock wasn’t one she had actually witnessed, but one related to her. Her own mind created the details.
A roped tied around the base of the rock, one end still tied to a strip of rubber tire. It had been a child’s swing, cut down and dragged up here.
On the other end of the rope, tossed over the edge, and hanging halfway down to the ground, a noose.
In that noose, the neck of Marissa Davies, age seventeen. Marissa had plans of attending the beauty school in Charleston, maybe one day starting her own salon. She had a bumpy romance with a twenty-five-year-old neighbor. She devoured romance novels, which worried her parents, but they tolerated it because if Marissa was in the hammock reading, it meant she wasn’t having a manic episode somewhere, liable to hurt herself.
Cessy was Marissa’s age, and didn’t know that her ostracized classmate had a bipolar disorder. She hardly knew what that meant.
But Cessy had since evaluated herself and the situation until exhaustion, and had come to admit and accept that even if she had known, her teenage self probably would have treated Marissa the same.
On the other hand, if she’d known that Marissa’s twenty-five-year-old boyfriend had recently dumped her, maybe she would have acted differently. Or if she’d known that Marissa had just found out that she lost the beauty school scholarship to a cheerleader from Giles.
But Cessy didn’t know those things, and so when Marissa lashed out during the last week of their senior year inside the Hamlin High cafeteria, shoved Cessy and called her a delinquent who’d end up in prison, Cessy let loose a string of personal insults, regarding the mobility of her home, the number and source of the stains on her second-hand clothes, her creepy adult boyfriend, and that she’d likely be stuck in the shittiest part of town in the shittiest town in the country, until she accepted she’d always be trash and put a shotgun in her mouth.
The Davies didn’t own a shotgun, but they did own a rope swing, and they lived half a mile from Maul Rock.
Lectures from Mom and Dad couldn’t make Cessy evaluate her life. Threats from Sheriff Miller couldn’t do it. Nights spent in jail only reinforced her blaming the town for her problems.
But hearing that Marissa Davies had gone home from Cessy’s insults and killed herself adjusted pathways in Cessy’s mind. Not right away--her first reaction was defiance--but over the next year, as Cessy wrestled with why that one cafeteria argument lingered in her thoughts when all the other trouble she’d caused was so easy to forget. It wasn’t her fault Marissa was depressed.
After a year of sideways looks from neighbors, one day Kate came home from kindergarten with a black eye, because one of the Davies’ neighbors heard that Kate’s sister killed someone. Cessy decided it was time to leave.
It was her fault her innocent baby sister got beat up on the playground, shocked how much it hurt, innocent to why someone would cause her that pain.
And if that was Cessy’s fault, then it meant that Marissa’s suicide was her fault.
Four years of her university’s free counselor helped Cessy decide that she was partially responsible, even if she’d been immature and unwitting, and that she needed to accept that that’s who she used to be.
She couldn’t explain that to Sheriff Miller. Not from the backseat, handcuffed, and bouncing over cracked asphalt as they pulled up to Maul Rock.
He stopped the truck. The radio host’s voice grew audible again. “...start from scratch. And who benefits? Not the upstanding men and women of Hamlin...”
He got out and opened her door. “Get out.”
“So you can rant until you’re red in the face about how terrible I am and it’s no wonder I left small towns behind?”
The woods had a smell of dead leaves, overtones of mold.
“That’s not quite it, no.” Sheriff Miller reached over to unbuckle her. His knees popped.
He left her to get out on her own. He went around to the back of the truck, came back. He had a noose hung over his shoulder.
24
Cessy swung her feet around and stood up from the back seat. Defiant, with her wrists handcuffed.
The truck engine was off, but the radio host Lockler still rambled about how the true citizens of Hamlin were noble and good. Although it was interrupted by bursts of static, Cessy wasn’t sure that his voice was coming through the truck speakers.
“The most succulent successes require the bloodiest sacrifices. We’re not talking about lambs and doves, but honest, God-fearing, back-breaking hard work. If you’re not up to it, then you’re not contributing, and how long can you expect your neighbors to carry you?”
Maul Rock waited up the hill, surrounded by dense forest.
She should call for help, but if she went for her phone in her pocket, Sheriff Miller would stop her. State Police could never get here in time, anyways. If she didn’t want that rough rope around her neck, escape was up to her.
Her heart pounded. Regret about not checking on Kate, flavored with resurfaced regret about insulting a suicidal classmate, both drowned out by the familiar need to survive. She was a cop--she had training. The question was whether it was enough against a man with his own training, and who had sixty pounds on her.
Sheriff Miller leered down at her. The noose dangled over his left shoulder, swaying with his jerky, arthritic movement. He drew his revolver from his right hip. “Got anything else snarky to say?”
Cessy’s training ingrained in her to deescalate the situation. Wrists still bound, she lifted her palms to show she had no violent intentions. Drooped her shoulders to look smaller and unthreatening. She leaned back against the truck. “I’m not running off. No need for that.”
The old man pulled back the hammer. He grimaced. “You wouldn’t understand what there is and isn’t a need for.”
“We’re stronger together. It’s like our American heroes believed, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Ronald Reagan: united we stand, divided we disappear. The diner is where we’ll be united.” His voice crackled with static. Cessy looked for radios hidden in the woods, where the voice came from, but she saw none.
Sheriff Miller leered down at her.
She took another swing at deescalation. “What did you promise my mom?”
He motioned with the pistol for Cessy to walk towards Maul Rock. “That’s a promise I’m not gonna be able to keep. I feel right sorry about it. Man’s word should be gold. But sometimes you choose between two good paths.” He rubbed at his back with his free hand. “Get on now.”
Cessy stood straight and walked up the hill. The radio host’s voice grew quieter the farther she got from the truck, but rather than getting farther away from the sound, it was like speakers were hidden in the woods along the trail, and someone was decreasing the volume as they walked away from the truck.
Maul Rock loomed over her. Afternoon sunlight pierced the treetops to light up the dark stone.
If de-escalation wouldn’t work, next step was distraction.
“When did Hamlin get a local radio station?”
Behind her, Sheriff Miller grunted with the effort of walking uphill. “Just keep walking.”
“Is it government run? Who’s the host? I don’t recognize hi
s voice. The morning show people, too. Who are they?”
It was quiet now, almost inaudible against the wind blowing through the undergrowth, but Cessy thought the radio host said, “No answers for idle questions.”
Cessy stopped. Sheriff Miller bumped into her. The pistol poked her shoulder blade.
She dropped. Rolled over, reared back her legs to kick out the old man’s knees.
“Easy,” he barked. His lanky arms held the pistol not three feet from her face.
The barrel was like the restless hole she’d ripped from her gut.
“You jabbed me in the back, I thought you were about to shoot me. Can’t blame a girl for flinching.” She carefully crawled back to her feet.
They continued their climb.
“You were telling me about these radio shows everyone’s listening to.”
“I’ve got no answers for idle questions.”
Cessy’s legs ached. “Nothing about this is idle. We’re climbing a hill so you can execute me for bullying a girl twenty years ago. I’m going to die because the citizens of Hamlin elected a senile old man who thinks time stopped when he was fifty.”
And if distraction wouldn’t work, aggravate. Emotional judgement created opportunities. Of course, the risk here was that the perp’s hasty decision could be to put a bullet in your head.
“Your mother swore you were different, but you’re not. You’re as disrespectful as the rest of them.”
“I should respect a man who wants to hang me for how I acted as a teenager?”
“You’re getting stuck on the method. I brought this noose along because it feels right. Like a puzzle piece snapping into place.”
They reached the top of the hill. Maul Rock overlooked the short cliff.
“You’re saying this isn’t about Marissa Davies? That’s just a bonus?” Puzzle pieces clicked together in Cessy’s mind. Not enough to show the full picture, but more jigsaw connections were becoming obvious.
“Chuck and Paulina mourned for their daughter. They’re my friends, my responsibility, and I owe them-”
Cessy turned around. “But even if I’d never met Marissa, right now you’d still be trying to kill me. Your brain is falling apart, but there’s still enough reason in there that you’ve got a purpose.”
