by Ninie Hammon
Raylynn wasn’t sitting at the reception desk and wasn’t one of them bell things on the counter to ring to summon her. ‘Sides, Viola didn’t feel like waiting for nobody. Raylynn was back in the back, in E.J.’s room, likely, so Viola marched through the connecting door and into the hallway, looking for her in each of the rooms as she passed them.
In the second one on the right, she heard a sound coming from under the door and burst into the room without bothering to knock.
It wasn’t E.J.’s room, though. Sam Sheridan sat in a chair beside a bed with a young boy stretched out on it. it was her boy, Rusty was his name. Viola had heard about how that Looney Tune Claire McFarland had gone nuts when her kid showed up in the Middle of Nowhere after he got bit by a rattlesnake, heard the crazy woman had gone down to Bascum’s and snatched the corpse of her kid out of the funeral home. There was more to the story, something about her kidnapping Sam’s boy for some reason, that Malachi’d had to coldcock that McFarland woman because she was holding a shotgun on the lot of them.
But she didn’t know Sam’s boy’d been hurt.
And clearly he had, because the sound she’d heard from outside in the hallway was somebody crying. Sam.
Sam sat frozen now, staring at Viola, and Viola suspected she might have been the last person in the world Sam expected to see in her son’s hospital room. Viola felt uncharacteristically uncomfortable about storming in like she done. Sam Sheridan was … well, didn’t nobody in the county have nothing against that woman. Viola certainly wouldn’t have bothered her if she’d knowed—
“What are you … what do you want?” Sam stammered, as she quickly wiped the tears off her cheeks, like she was embarrassed somebody’d caught her crying. No, not embarrassed. More like … and then Viola got it. Sam didn’t want nobody to see her cry because she was in charge. She had to be strong even if she didn’t feel like it because they was folks counting on her. Viola got it because she knew what it felt like to be the one calling the shots, the one everybody looked to to know what to do … so you had to act like you knew even if you didn’t have no idea.
“Sorry,” Viola heard herself say. Couldn’t remember the last time she’d apologized for anything. “Didn’t mean to come storming in like that.” She drew herself up, tried to summon the anger and indignation that had propelled her but it had dissipated when she stepped into the room and saw Sam sitting by the hospital bed crying.
The room had obviously been converted from a storage room into a hospital room. It had no windows and there were boxes stacked against the far wall. In fact, it seemed more like somebody’s bedroom than a hospital room. The kid was lying on his side on a half bed, not a hospital bed. There was a table beside the bed that had a lamp on it, not a hospital room lamp but one out of a living room, with a brass base and a lampshade. The shade softened the light, so that the illumination fell in a gentle glow out from it and across the youngster lying so still on the white sheet.
And something happened to Viola when she looked at the boy, really saw him.
His face was pale, almost as white as the crisp pillowcase where his head lay. His hair was tousled on his forehead, brown hair but there were hints of his mother’s red hair in the glow of the lamplight.
He was a handsome boy, would be a heartthrob one of these days, would have to beat the girls off with a stick just like her Malachi.
And then Viola Tackett lost her breath.
She couldn’t breathe when an image burst into her mind, leapt right front and centerstage with a bright light shining on it. It was perfect in every detail, as clear as one of them pictures from a fancy camera that had lenses you could take off and change. Crisp. Not a memory because memories weren’t that clear. It was an image that had dragged a moment from the past into the center of her mind and lit it up hot and stinking in the middle of it.
Viola stood as frozen as a grave stone.
“… do you want?”
Sam’s words came from a long way off, from the bottom of a well where the water was so far down you could barely hear a plunk sound when you tossed in a rock.
Viola looked at Sam, took in her face as if it were the face of a stranger, looked at it the way you look at someone you just met. She looked from Sam to the boy — Rusty. His name was Rusty. That hair was the thing, the color of rust. Not red like his mother’s but darker. As if the red had been stirred together with black and the mixed color — neither black nor red but some color that was both and neither. The color of rust.
“… want here?”
Viola heard the words and listened to them now, not because the distracting image had left her mind but because it had settled down there, snuggled in warm and comfortable in a spot where it fit perfectly.
“I’m … looking for Malachi. You seen him?”
Her words were like them words that come out of a doll without no feeling in them, like a recording.
“He left a while ago in Charlie’s car to take Reverend Norman out to Scott’s Ridge. Reverend Norman thinks—”
“Thinks his Hayley was there before she got beat to death. Yeah, I heard. What’s wrong with him?”
Sam was confused. “Wrong with who? Reverend Norman?”
“No, him.” She gestured at the boy on the bed. “What happened?”
She could see the question hit Sam like a blow to the belly.
“He … Claire McFarland … shot him!” There was steel rage in those two words and Viola would have expected nothing less. “In the back … with a shotgun. The buckshot almost … it peeled all the skin off!”
“That ain’t all, though, is it?” Viola had turned back to look at the boy on the bed. “What’s the rest of it?”
“She forced him to … she shoved him into the Jabberwock and he came back here.”
Viola’s head snapped toward Sam.
“You saying he rode the Jabberwock a second time?”
Sam just nodded, didn’t say the words out loud. Maybe couldn’t.
“He gonna be alright, ain’t he?” It was less a question than a demand.
Sam looked at her, as surprised as Viola was by her words. Viola watched her struggle, saw her quash the knee-jerk, he’ll-be-fine response and replace it with the truth.
“I … don’t know.” She spoke the next words in a whisper full of desperation. “He needs a doctor! He could have … brain damage.”
“No, he ain’t,” Viola barked. “He ain’t got nothing of the kind. That boy’s gonna be fine, just fine. You’ll see.”
Sam’s head snapped toward her and their eyes locked and held. Something escaped from Sam in that moment that didn’t need no words to say it. Viola was sure Sam was unaware the knowing had got away from her, didn’t know it had broke out of that place deep in the dark where she kept it.
Viola stopped breathing again. Couldn’t a’drawn a breath even if it was her last one on this earth.
She didn’t say another word. Couldn’t. Just turned on her heel and strode out of the room, back down the hallway — brushing past Raylynn without even asking about Malachi — across the waiting room, out the door to the car.
When she slammed the car door shut, Zach asked, “We goin’ home, Mama?”
“Yeah, home.” Then she shook her head. “Not in town, not to the Nower House.” She heard the slip-up but didn’t care. “We going home to Turkey Neck Hollow. You get us to Chicken Gizzard Ridge fast, boy, fast as you can. There’s something there I got to see.”
Chapter Sixteen
After Malachi’s fourth week in boot camp at Marine Corps Training Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, the grunts — as the shaved-headed recruits were called — were allowed to watch old movies and old tv shows in the rec room off the commissary on Friday nights, and it was there that he was introduced to classic shows he had never seen because he had grown up in a home that had no television set. The grunts hooted and howled at the absurd “special effects” of the old science fiction movies. Malachi was particularly fond of the
robot on Lost in Space with arms that looked like the hoses that connected clothes driers to outside vents, with pincher hands like ice tongs on the ends. He loved it when the robot lit up like a pinball machine and announced in a monotone, “Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson.”
The moment the Pentecostal church minister slid into the front seat beside Malachi in Charlie’s borrowed car, all Malachi’s gut instincts, trained combat instincts, all his ‘marine’s sixth sense’ instincts sounded the same alarm as that robot. All of them were bleating Danger! Danger! Danger!
Something was very, very wrong with Duncan Norman.
“Good morning, Reverend Norman,” he said. The man turned eyes as hard as granite on him and said nothing, just bobbed his head in the barest acknowledgement.
Okay, fine. The man just lost his only daughter. Sam said he’d refused to take her advice to remember his daughter as the girl in the picture in his wallet — and had rushed to Bascum’s to see the girl’s body. Malachi had seen it when Skeeter Burkett had lifted the tarp off it in the back of Ed Reynolds’s pickup truck and had helped carry the body into the basement of the funeral home and lay it on the tray of one of the refrigeration drawers. It was as gristly a sight as Malachi had ever seen on a battlefield, a body that’d been tossed into a river off a 600-foot cliff after being beaten beyond recognition.
Murdered by Howie Witherspoon.
Had to be. Howie had shown up in the courtroom Sunday afternoon looking like he’d been kicked in the face … with the kind of combat boot Hayley’d been wearing when she was fished out of the river. A broken nose, black eyes, missing teeth and an injured thumb Malachi would bet had been bitten. And most important, four telltale scratches — gouges down his left cheek. Claw marks, the signature of a woman with long fingernails. He’d noticed Hayley’s — brightly painted stick-on nails and one on her right hand had been broken off.
He hadn’t asked Toby any questions — didn’t want to traumatize the poor kid any worse than he already had been, but the boy had babbled out his story, obviously needed to talk about it as Malachi had driven him to take refuge at Sam’s house the night after Malachi’s mother had hanged an innocent teenager from a lamp post in front of the courthouse. It’d been the same horrifying tale Toby’d told to Viola in court — of watching his father beat his mother, “careful not to leave bruises where they’d show” and then she’d vanished and his father had said she’d gone shopping in Lexington and was trapped outside the county by the Jabberwock. But Toby said she had been home that day, and had presented Viola his mother’s purse that the dog had dug up out of the compost heap as proof that she “wouldn’t have gone shopping without her credit cards.”
Clearly, Howie had killed his wife. But Viola had set him free and given Toby back to him, after warning the boy not to keep “telling them lies” about his father. If Malachi hadn’t intervened, hadn’t killed Howie as he held a knife to the boy’s throat, Howie would have murdered Toby, too.
And as they’d ridden through the darkness that night, Toby had expanded on his tale of horror, described how he’d overheard his father talk “like he was mad” to someone he called “Hayley” on the phone Saturday afternoon, arranged to meet her. About being left all alone — trying not to be scared — until his father came home Saturday night injured and bloody. Howie had been having sex with a teenage girl, got her pregnant, and when she couldn’t get an abortion, he had murdered her.
Now, Malachi sat in strained silence beside the girl’s father, driving him out to Scott’s Ridge overlook to pick up the car Hayley’d left there before she died. Before he’d picked Duncan up at his house, Malachi had been considering whether or not he ought to share with the man what he knew about his daughter’s murder. But that would beg the question: where was Howie Witherspoon now? Duncan Norman would want to know, would demand justice … and justice had already been served. Malachi had carried out the death sentence to save Toby … but if Viola found out he’d done that, she’d pronounce her own death sentence on Charlie.
It was all so convoluted and complicated. Every action set off a domino effect that cascaded danger everywhere the dominoes fell.
Malachi couldn’t tell Duncan what he knew, at least not now. It would put Charlie’s life in danger. And besides, right now, Duncan Norman didn’t look like a man able to process information like that. He looked like a man on a razor’s edge of … insanity.
Giving up any effort to make small talk with the minister, Malachi stole sidelong looks at the man as he drove down Wiley Road north out of the Ridge, then onto Crockett Pike to Bent Creek Road, which wound up the side of Ironwood Mountain and then down into Chicory Hollow. The nameless road that provided access to the Scott’s Ridge Overlook, with its panoramic view across the Rolling Fork River into Dragonroot Hollow, was just “the overlook road.”
Duncan Norman was handsome in an austere, aristocratic way, reminded Malachi of the actor Gregory Peck, whose face bore solemnity more comfortably than a smile. Malachi certainly wouldn’t expect Duncan Norman to be smiling now — he had never seen a man so tense — not even going into a firefight. The minister was strung as tight as the high-note keys on a piano. Malachi’d looked into the back of a piano once, saw the wires stretched tight that the little hammers struck to make music notes. The shortest wires, the ones strung the tightest of all, were the ones attached to the keys on the far right side of the instrument. Duncan Norman was a man whose whole being could produce only high notes.
Even that was off, though. He wasn’t upset, mourning, devastated. He appeared to be … angry. Yes, there was raging fury, boiling hatred barely held in check behind his eyes. That was perhaps an understandable response to the murder of your daughter … but it was more than that. More focused and directed than blind rage. Duncan Norman’s whole carriage and demeanor radiated … what? Danger! Like heat pulsing off a wood stove. Malachi could sense it. Could smell it.
The man seated beside him was as perilous as a ticking IED. And somehow Malachi couldn’t register that as “understandable” in his mind.
Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Waves of danger lapped against Malachi’s instincts. And he had no idea what it was.
He pulled Charlie’s car into a secluded parking lot in the trees. The scenic overlook faced due west, surrounded on three sides by forest. The lot was north of the overlook, connected to it by a winding pathway that meandered through a quarter mile of woods. As expected, there was a car parked there, an old Ford. Malachi didn’t ask if it was Duncan Norman’s car because it was clear from the look on his face that it was. What else was clear from the look on his face was that the sight of it had primed the fuse. He was just about to blow.
Malachi wondered what form the explosion would take, but suspected whatever it was, it was going to be ugly. Maybe Duncan had known this was how it’d be and that’s why he’d asked a stranger to accompany him. Perhaps he really didn’t want any members of his congregation to watch him lose it and become completely hysterical.
Or worse.
Malachi drove behind the Ford and pulled into the space beside it, put the car in park and killed the engine. And looked at Duncan Norman.
The man didn’t move, just sat staring straight ahead.
Malachi opened his door and got out, walked around the back of the car and into the space between it and the Ford. Duncan got out and closed the car door behind him and stood looking at the driver’s side of his own car.
As soon as Malachi got close, he saw it, too.
Oh, no.
Malachi’s heart sank.
It would be no simple thing for Duncan Norman to get into his car and drive away. There was dried blood all over the driver’s side door, on the handle, dripping in a dried rivulet down the side of the car and all over the driver’s side window.
Malachi looked through the bloody window and saw a white leather purse sitting in the passenger seat. It was the kind that snapped shut at the top and it was standing open, with dried blood
stains all over it. Howie had obviously come to Hayley’s car after he killed her, wanted something out of her purse, and had smeared her blood and his all over everywhere.
How could Rev. Norman just … get into the bloody car and drive away? Maybe Malachi could clean some of it off. Maybe Charlie had something in her car — a towel or something he could use to wipe the blood off — at least off the door handle. He turned back toward Charlie’s car and saw Duncan had moved, had backed away after he closed the car door. He had stopped beside the front bumper of the car. He was holding a pistol that he raised and leveled at Malachi’s chest.
The man spoke then for the first time, let loose a torrent of obscenities Malachi was surprised he even knew. He spit the words out as if each one tasted unimaginably foul in his mouth and they rode a wave of rage the man vomited out into the air between them.
Not sentences. Individual words and phrases. He was sputtering, spittle flying out at Malachi, his eyes so wild the pupils were dilated like he was on drugs. But his hands on the pistol were firm. The barrel didn’t shake. He held it in a two-hand grip out in front of him while he shrieked.
Malachi finally gathered sense from the nonsensical ravings.
Duncan Norman believed Malachi had killed Hayley. And he would become the Lord’s righteous hand of retribution, delivering justice. An eye for an eye.
Malachi had maybe five seconds before the man opened fire and put a bullet in his chest. He had to disarm him, but Malachi needed a distraction, a moment of inattention.
Then he noticed the handprint.