The Hanging Judge (Nowhere, USA Book 4)

by Ninie Hammon

  The only thing the boy knew about proof and crimes and such came from the cop shows he watched on television back when television sets still worked. Back before J-Day. He lived on the outskirts of the Ridge, so he got pretty good reception, the ridge being in a good-sized hollow where the surrounding mountains didn’t block the signal, at least not all the time.

  His favorite cop show was NYPD Blue and he watched it religiously, never missed an episode. His favorite character, as unlikely as it seemed, was Andy Sipowicz. The reason Toby liked him so much was because he wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t the usual hero who was handsome and always got his man and all the girls wanted to take him home to their apartments “for a drink, later …”

  He actually reminded Toby of his father, and he had trouble reconciling the reality that he hated his father with how much he loved the television character who drank on the job, and was a negative bigot — didn’t like women, except for the drink-later part, which none of them ever invited him to, or black people or gay people or … he was mostly negative about everything.

  Which was just like Toby’s father.

  Except Sipowicz managed to make all those characteristics okay. Toby admired him because he kept going even when life wasn’t good, even when he didn’t get the girl or got caught drinking or … well, there was the time he got shot by somebody he’d made fun of earlier.

  Mostly Toby admired him because he was so good at his job. He was what the other characters called “a cop’s cop,” which Toby took to mean the best of the best. He had watched Sipowicz solve crimes, watched how he found evidence, followed the clues and caught the bad guys.

  So when Toby set out to prove that his father had killed his mother, it wasn’t like he didn’t know how to do that. He did, knew his was an uphill battle because he lacked the key things all the cop shows used to catch the bad guys.

  He didn’t have a … body.

  The first time he’d thought of it that way, of his mother as a body, he went into the bathroom and threw up, coughed and gagged, stuff coming out of his nose and acid burning up the back off his throat.

  But after he got that out of his system, he was able to kinda pretend it was somebody else’s body, not his mother. Didn’t matter whose body it was, though, he didn’t have one. Which meant there was no way to take a bullet out of the body and compare it to a gun and determine that was the murder weapon, because of those marks on the bullet, scratches made on it when it was fired down the gun barrel.

  Without a body, there was no way to even prove she was dead, let alone murdered. And not just murdered, but murdered by his father.

  So he tried to think about it like Sipowicz would. What would he do? If he thought somebody’d been murdered, there had to be a reason. Toby knew his mother had been murdered because she’d been home on J-Day. Toby had seen her, though he feared he might have been the only person who had and he didn’t think that kind of evidence would go very far. But his father went around telling people that her sister had come to get her and the two of them were shopping for shoes in Lexington and his mother got caught outside the Jabberwock mirage.

  What Sipowicz would do, Toby thought, was work with what he had instead of moping around about what he didn’t have. His mother had been home on J-Day. Was there any way to prove that? She had not gone shoe shopping with her sister like his father said. Was there any way to prove that? Was there any evidence that his father had lied about the whereabouts of his mother?

  Toby had spent days thinking about it and was no closer to figuring it out than when he started.

  And what did the condition of his father when he came home last night have to do with his mother’s murder? Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe it was some other thing altogether — something bad, though, because his father was trying to cover it up. He had taken the clothes he’d been wearing, the ones that were covered in blood, out to the trash barrel last night where they’d be burned up. Why didn’t he just wash out the blood? It was odd — suspicious — so Toby’d retrieved the garments from the garbage first thing this morning and stuck them in the back of the woodpile. Then he had set the trash on fire. His father’d been mad about that. Toby wasn’t ever supposed to burn the trash. His mother’d been afraid he would catch his clothing on fire. His father didn’t have nearly as many rules about Toby’s behavior as his mother’d had, and actually had already been so drunk by the time he realized the trash was on fire that he had done little but yell at Toby and call him stupid.

  His father was probably using the alcohol to dull the pain, which Toby suspected was pretty bad. Black eye, swollen nose that was probably broken, busted lip, and his front tooth was chipped, had a big hunk knocked out of it. He’d told Toby he fell down some stairs, then went off into his den to read sports magazines and get drunker.

  Toby was just about to make himself a sandwich for lunch when he took Custard out to do her business and she got off the leash. Custard had been his mother’s dog, a yappy little beast from the animal shelter that didn’t do much of anything except bark and dig holes in the backyard and sit in his mother’s lap while she was reading.

  The dog would have starved to death after J-Day if it hadn’t been for Toby. No, she wouldn’t have lived long enough to starve because his father would have killed her for making messes on the floor when nobody took her out.

  Toby didn’t like the dog, but he didn’t want it to die, either, so he’d taken over responsibility for the animal. He hadn’t been careful that evening when he took her out, didn’t fasten the leash properly on her collar and as soon as she had squatted, done her do and kicked dirt over it with her hind feet, she’d run off.

  There was no catching Custard if she didn’t want to be caught, so Toby didn’t bother to try. She’d come home when she got hungry. Or she wouldn’t. He was okay with it either way. And sure enough, she’d come scratching at the back door while Toby was eating his sandwich. When he opened the door, he found the dog on the back porch with something she’d dug up in the yard. It was covered in dirt, but Toby instantly recognized it.

  It was his mother’s purse.

  He let the dog in, took the purse and hurried upstairs to the bathroom to clean it up. It was leather, so the dirt came off easy, and it’d been zipped up so the contents were untouched. His mother’s wallet was inside, with her credit cards and the extra set of car keys to the Ford. Her asthma inhaler was there as well.

  His mother would not have driven off with her sister to go buy shoes — without her purse and wallet. And she never went anywhere without her inhaler.

  Toby sat on the side of the tub, looking at the purse he’d cleaned off and set on the closed toilet lid beside him.

  This was proof, wasn’t it? Proof even Sipowicz would have bought. But it was only proof that his mother hadn’t gone to Lexington. It wasn’t proof that his father had killed her. How could Toby …?

  Toby froze. Custard had come into the bathroom behind him and he’d locked her in with him, and now he sat staring at the dog, wondering.

  There was a big compost pile behind the garage. It’d been his mother’s idea, said it would keep the septic tank from getting stopped up and they could use it for fertilizer on her flowers. Toby had helped her dig the hole. It was only about three feet deep.

  She was the only one who took stuff out and dumped it there. He hadn’t been there since she left. What if …?

  Maybe that’s where Custard had dug up her purse. And maybe that’s where … He couldn’t do it. Absolutely, one hundred percent could not do it. He could not go out there with a shovel and try to dig up …

  Toby shivered. He didn’t have to, though, did he? Didn’t he have enough evidence for “probably cause,” to get somebody to search the property, somebody to dig up the compost heap behind the garage?

  Right, and who might that be?

  The sheriff, of course. They lived close enough to town that Toby could ride his bike there. He could take his mother’s purse to the sher
iff’s office, show it to him, tell him how his daddy beat up his mother all the time and how she had been home — he had seen her! — on J-Day.

  Toby got up and wrapped the purse in a big bath towel, left the bathroom and shoved the towel and purse under his bed. He would wait until his father was very drunk, asleep on the couch, and then he would get on his bike and take his mother’s purse to the sheriff, convince him to come find the “evidence” he feared was buried in a grave behind the garage.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As soon as Pete seen Charlie with Merrie beside her mama’s car, he rushed — for Pete, it was “rushing” — across the parking lot to be a gentleman and help her find whatever it was she was looking for. She was down on her knees beside the open back door, digging around under the front passenger seat and came up with a red crayon just as he got there to help.

  Though he’d changed his mind about it a dozen times on the walk from his house to the clinic, he understood he had to tell her what he’d seen on the map in his living room, that crazy as it was, she had a right to know.

  “‘Lo, Pete,” she said when he approached.

  “Dog!” Merrie squealed, ran to the animal and threw her arms around his neck. He bore her effusiveness with dignity. “Mr. Rufford, can we play wiff the water hose? Squirt it up to the sky?”

  “Might be we’ll do just that,” he told her, “but I need to talk to your mama a bit first.”

  Charlie had obviously picked up on the look on his face — the look of a man who had something weighing on him. Or maybe just the look of a man who hadn’t had no appetite to speak of in over a week, so’s he’d already had to cinch up his belt two loops.

  Or the look of a man who was … dying.

  Dang, he hated that word. Sounded so whiney. But it was what it was.

  Charlie handed Merrie the crayon.

  “Take this inside and finish coloring your picture. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “It’s a red duck,” she told Pete. “Not a yellow one. Yellow ducks are boring.”

  Then she turned and headed into the building. Charlie closed the car door and leaned against it.

  “‘S’up?”

  Wasn’t no easy way to say it so he just put it out there, plain.

  “Your husband’s name wouldn’t happen to be Stuart, would it?” The look of shock on her face was all the answer he needed. “‘Cause if it is, I think maybe me and him had ourselves a little chat this morning.”

  He told her the story, the condensed version anyway, then she hauled him into the building, said she wanted him to tell the whole thing all over again to Sam Sheridan — and Malachi Tackett, who looked rode hard and put up wet, like maybe he’d had a bad night. Pete hadn’t been at last night’s county meeting but had heard all about it, about pool Liam! Maybe Malachi’s appearance had something to do with his mama taking over the whole county.

  “Welcome to the Breakfast Club,” Malachi said as he sipped what looked like a cup full of road tar. “But the only role left to play is that idiot teacher and you don’t fit the part at all.”

  “I ain’t got no idea what you just said.”

  “Never mind, it’s a movie—”

  “Don’t do movies. Television, neither.”

  “Sit down, Pete,” Sam said. “You don’t look good.”

  Pete wanted to fire back that she didn’t look so hot herself, but it wasn’t true. Sam Sheridan was a beautiful woman — wholesome beautiful, and he hadn’t never seen her that she didn’t look scrubbed-up-clean gorgeous.

  Charlie tossed the words out into the room like a hand grenade.

  “Pete talked to Stuart this morning, too.” Too? “Tell them, Pete.”

  So Pete told them. The room was silent when he finished and he wanted to ask what Charlie’d meant, but let it go for later.

  Malachi was the first to recover. Recognition flowed over his face and he asked Charlie, “Stuart McClintock? I just put it together. Is your husband the—?”

  “Pittsburgh Steelers — yes,” she said.

  Pete didn’t know what a football team had to do with anything, but he let that go for later, too.

  “You tried to do it again, you say?” Malachi asked. “Tried to send another ‘message’?”

  “Yup, stuck pins all over that map, then stood there waiting, but didn’t no other ones appear. Way I got it figured … and of course this is so crazy it don’t mean nothing—”

  “You’re going to have to take the oath, too,” Sam said.

  Sam made an X motion across her heart with her right hand and then held it up in an I-swear position. “We’ve made an agreement that we don’t censor what we tell each other because we think whatever it is we’ve experienced is too nutty to be believable. These days in Nower County, everything’s believable.”

  That was a smart thing to do and Pete felt some of the tension drain away.

  “Deal.” He made the same X motion across his heart. “So what I figured was there was … something there in the beginning when I first got home. Dog was all bent outta shape over it, went postal — if you’ll forgive an old mail carrier a little post office humor. And soon’s whatever it was left … I don’t know, the door shut, maybe.”

  “Door shut?” Charlie asked. You could tell she was real tore up over what Pete’d told her but was struggling to hold herself together.

  “The doorway … the link … passageway …” Pete offered. “I’d say ‘portal,’ but then we’d all start hearing the theme song from The Twilight Zone.”

  “Okay, door,” Charlie said. “But the door to where?”

  “I don’t think we can figure out where the door leads to until we have some understanding of where it leads from,” Malachi said. “Here. Where we are? Where exactly is that?”

  “It shore as Jackson ain’t Nower County, Kentucky,” Pete found himself saying, and felt the truth of the words as they left his lips.

  No one said anything, like maybe they’d been thinking the same thing, but it was a lot more powerful a thought when you heard it coming out of somebody else’s mouth.

  “Not the real one, anyway. It’s … made up, but whoever, whatever made it up didn’t get all the details right.”

  “But how can that be?” Sam almost wailed the words.

  “Let’s skip the how part for now,” Malachi suggested, “and concentrate on the what. I think we are in Nower County.” He turned to Pete. “I think you were in your living room this morning in Nower County, Kentucky. And I think … there was somebody else in your house this morning, too. At the same time you were there. That somebody else was Stuart McClintock.”

  “Whoa, Bessie, let’s pull this wagon back up to the barn and start loading it all over again,” Pete said. “Slow. You sayin’ you think I was in my living room and Stuart McClintock was also in my living room at the same time, but we couldn’t see each other?”

  “You got any other explanation for how those stickpins just appeared?”

  “But how could—?” Sam began.

  “We’re skipping the how for now, remember,” Malachi said. “All the questions that begin with how have the same answer: the Jabberwock.”

  “So … I was in my living room, and Charlie’s husband, Stuart, was also in my living room at the same time” — Charlie looked like she was ready to cry — “but we couldn’t … connect with each other?”

  “That would mean Stuart was also in my kitchen yesterday,” Charlie said. “Is that what you think — that Stuart was—?”

  “Had to be,” Malachi said, then turned to Pete. “Actually, you could connect with each other — at least briefly. As long as the door was open—”

  “As long as Dog was barking at—"

  “At the Jabberwock,” Malachi said. “The Jabberwock was there, the Jabberwock that’s in our world. It was obviously in … the other world, the other Nower County in your living room … at the same time. And in Charlie’s kitchen yesterday. The Jabberwock is the door.”

  �
�When it left, the door closed.”

  “So the only way to connect to … to the real world out there is through the Jabberwock?” Sam asked.

  “Sounds like it,” Malachi said.

  “Goody.” It was all Pete could say, didn’t have no air to say anything else.

  Silence flowed into the room, heavy and oppressive. Then Malachi got to his feet. “I suggest we go have us a little chat with the Jabberwock.”

  “Go sit at the county line and talk to our reflections?” Sam asked.

  “No.” He turned to Charlie. “I say we go to Charlie’s house and write the chap a letter.” Pete’s face musta looked as confused as he felt so Malachi told him about the words that’d appeared on Charlie’s blackboard this morning. “We need to figure out what game we’re playing and the J-dude is the only one who knows. Maybe he’ll show up and we can be pen pals.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The world whirled around Charlie. Malachi was suggesting they all go to her house and see if they could get the Jabberwock to chat with them through the blackboard in her kitchen.

  Charlie was struggling to stay in the here-and-now while inside her mind a klaxon cry was echoing off the insides of her skull.

  Stuart was here!

  Okay, not here here. But here nonetheless.

  Stuart had come looking for her.

  He really had!

  Charlie didn’t have anywhere inside to put a revelation like that. It was such an enormous concept that when she tried to stuff it into her head she could feel pieces of it dangling out her ears.

  She’d told herself that the “message” she’d gotten from Stuart yesterday morning was just her own yearning, that she’d written the words herself. She pretty much had herself convinced that was true until the chalked message appeared on her blackboard from the Jabberwock.

  She probably hadn’t slept more than half an hour last night trying to process the implications of the two messages, still denying in her heart of hearts that Stuart really had written the first one.