by Ninie Hammon
“Viola!” she whispered and the two of them froze.
They waited a few seconds, then Sam eased the door open a crack again. “She’s going upstairs.”
As soon as Sam saw Viola and the other boys turn the corner on the first-floor landing and start up the stairs to the second floor, she threw the door open and sprinted across the back of the hallway and out the back door of the building. Under normal circumstances, Charlie would have had trouble keeping up with the fleet-footed former basketball player. Terror fueled her now and she matched Sam step for step.
At the corner of the building outside, they paused, then walked slowly into the crowd that was milling around the steps, past a tree where a little boy was climbing down the trunk. He was just a little boy, maybe eight years old, and he’d climbed up in that tree so he could see the hanging. He’d watched!
The boy darted away into the crowd and Charlie kept her head turned, refused to look in the direction of the courthouse steps, where she knew somebody was at that moment hauling down the dead body of a teenage boy murdered by Viola Tackett.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Malachi was sitting up, leaned against the railing in the courtroom with his pistol in his lap when his mother and brothers came back into the room. She came directly to him, stood over him, looking down.
“You alright?”
“What do you care? I’m not dripping blood on your clean kitchen floor.”
She offered a crooked smile at that.
“Take them cuffs off,” she told Obie, and Malachi watched a stricken look appear on his brother’s face as he began to frantically pat his pockets. “You lose that key and I’ll—”
“I got it, Ma,” he said, holding it forth like a kid that’d just pulled his first tooth. And Malachi was struck anew by how unutterably dumb his brothers were. Zach had a little on the ball, but you could combine the IQs of Neb and Obie and still not get a two-digit number.
Obie knelt and Malachi turned to offer his hands so Obie could unlock the cuffs when a little boy burst into the room, looking around frantically.
“Get that kid outta here,” Viola told Neb, but as soon as she spoke the kid made a beeline for her. He was a rail-thin boy with blond hair falling in his eyes and a lower lip that stuck out a little like a natural pout.
“Are you Vio-da Pickett?”
She didn’t answer, just gestured toward the door and Neb stepped forward and grabbed the kid by the arm to drag him out.
“No, wait. They said you was the judge and jury,” he cried, pulling frantically away. “There ain’t no law but you. You gotta help me.”
“Get him outta here.”
“No, please. You don’t understand.” Neb began dragging the struggling child toward the door. “My daddy murdered my mama.”
Neb stopped dragging and looked at Viola.
“What are you talking about, son?” she asked.
Neb let go of the boy and the kid ran up to Viola and started babbling, while Malachi got to his feet, rubbing his wrists where the handcuffs had chafed. He didn’t touch the throbbing knot on the back of his head, though. Didn’t want to set it off to pounding again. He leaned over and picked up his pistol off the floor.
“He beat her up all the time and hurt her with the belt but the ladies in her Bunco didn’t know because he made sure the bruises were where they couldn’t see.”
That appeared to pique Viola’s interest because it had the ring of truth. A kid his age wouldn’t know a thing like that unless he’d actually seen it.
“And he hurt her all the time and it was really bad and I saw her the morning of J-Day in the kitchen and they were yelling and I ran off because it scared me and at Billy’s house they were talking about the Jabberwock and his mama wanted to go see and so she took us to the Middle of Nowhere and we looked. It stunk, everybody was puking and then she took me home and Daddy was there but Mama wasn’t and when I asked where she was he said it wasn’t any of my business. She didn’t come home that night — she never doesn’t come home! The next day, Daddy heard about the Jabberwock and he told everybody that Mama had left the day before to go see her sister in Lexington — but she didn’t. I saw her. And last night he came home with blood all over him and his face all mashed in and I knew he had been in a fight and maybe hurt somebody else and I went looking for proof, you know, evidence, like Detective Sipowicz woulda done—”
“Stop!” his mother held up her hand, clearly out of patience. “What makes you think your daddy—?”
“I got evidence! Proof. Custard was Mama’s dog and she got off the leash this morning and ran away and when she came back, she was carrying my mama’s purse.” Malachi noticed for the first time that the boy was carrying something wrapped in a garbage bag. “Here,” he said and began unwrapping the package. He took out of it a dirt-encrusted purse and held it out to Viola. “See. Custard dug it up. It’s my mama’s purse.”
Viola didn’t take the purse, just looked at the kid.
“Mama wouldn’t have left town without her purse.”
Now, Malachi was more than a little interested. The kid was right. No woman he’d ever met would allow herself to be separated from her purse for more than ten minutes. Certainly wouldn’t have gone out of town and left it behind.
And somebody’d buried the purse, had tried to hide it. Though his mother’s face was a mask of disinterest, Malachi knew she was thinking the same thing.
When Viola still said nothing, the boy opened the purse and dumped out the contents on the floor. There was a wallet, a plastic zipped bag that probably carried makeup, pieces of gum, receipts, a blue plastic thing, hair ties, a pen and a pair of glasses and other miscellaneous trash. The boy picked up the blue plastic thing.
“Mama has asthma,” he said. “She never goes anywhere without her inhaler. She can’t breathe.” He dropped the inhaler, picked up the billfold and held it out to Viola.
“Look in this.”
Viola took the wallet and opened it up, examined it as he continued his desperate monologue. “See. See! Her driver’s license is in there. She wouldn’t have left town without her driver’s license. And her credit cards. Daddy said she went shopping with her sister in Lexington but how could she go shopping without any credit cards?”
The kid was right, of course. Malachi knew it and so did his mother.
“I think I know where Custard dug up the purse but I’m not sure because I didn’t want to go there.”
The kid had been barreling along, his emotions carrying him full speed ahead but now those same emotions clogged his throat and he had trouble talking.
“I helped Mama dig the pit for the compost heap. It’s deep. If that’s where Custard dug up her purse, then maybe …”
He couldn’t go on. Had been propelled by his fear and anger but now the emotion was grief and it was too big and heavy for the kid to carry.
“You think yore daddy kilt yore mama and buried her and her purse in the compost heap — that what you’s telling me?”
The boy wasn’t crying and Malachi was proud of him for it. He was swallowing hard to keep from it, though he couldn’t control the wash of tears that poured down his cheeks. He nodded his head slowly, his lip trembling.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, surprising Malachi that he was able to pull the words out of his throat.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Toby Witherspoon.”
“Howie Witherspoon’s boy? Your daddy owns the Dollar General Store, don’t he?”
He nodded.
She turned to Neb. “Take this kid into that office.” To the boy she said, “You wait there till I tell you to come out, hear?”
He nodded and Neb led him away. To Zach, she said, “Call Howie. Tell him I want to talk to him, to haul his goat-smellin’ butt down to the courthouse right now — he don’t live far. If he ain’t home or at the store, go find him.”
Zach went off to make the call and Viola was finally able to direct her full attenti
on to Malachi.
“You wanna tell me what you was doing in here this morning with that woman and Sam Sheridan?”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“How many things can no mean? No, I won’t tell you what I was doing this morning or any other morning or explain to you who I was with and why that was. I’m a grown man, Mama, and unlike my idiot brothers, I have enough real estate between my ears that I don’t need my mother to make my decisions for me.”
“You done? Was that all the speech you wanted to make?”
“You don’t want to hear the speech I’d really like to make.”
“What, you think you tell me the truth you gonna hurt my feelings?”
“That would assume you have feelings to hurt, Mama, and you don’t.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you are a heartless, self-centered sociopath who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.”
“That about covers it.”
“Up to and including committing cold-blooded murder.”
“Uh huh, including murder. And you’re the only mother’s child on this planet could say a thing like that to me ‘thout me provin’ the truth of it by putting a bullet ‘tween their eyes.”
“You won’t shoot me, Mama.”
“No, I won’t.” She paused, looked him up and down, and he could hear the words coming before she opened her mouth. “But I will shoot that little friend of yours, what’s her name, Sylvia Ryan’s youngest?”
“Her name is Charlie McClintock. And if you—”
“If I what, you’ll what?” she snapped at him, eyes flashing. “This here’s what they call a Mexican standoff. You know I ain’t gonna shoot you and I know you ain’t gonna shoot me.”
“I wouldn’t count on that.” He looked down at the gun in his own hand, but it wasn’t a bluff he could run. That was the thing. She had him and she knew it. She was his mother. He couldn’t threaten to kill her because they both knew he wasn’t capable of the kind of indiscriminate violence she served up whenever it suited her. He couldn’t shoot her down in cold blood. But she could and absolutely would do that to Charlie.
He stuffed the pistol into the waistband of his jeans in the back and let his tee shirt drop over it.
“What do you want from me, Mama?” His voice was as hard and cold as an Arctic glacier.
“For you to do right by your family, that’s what. You’s kin. We’re blood. Ain’t nothing in life important as that and you need to own up to your responsibilities.”
“Meaning?”
“Don’t cross me, boy. Don’t you set yourself up on the other side of what I’m doing. This here is my county and I’m gonna run it as suits me and ain’t nobody … nobody gonna get in my way and live to see another sunrise.”
“If you think I’m going to help you—”
“You hear me asking for your help? I’m doing just fine my own self, thank you very much, and I don’t need nothing from you nor nobody else.” She paused for a beat. “But I will not tolerate one of mine lining up against me. You understand what I’m saying, boy?”
“And if I stay out of it …?”
“Your little friend — what’s her name? Charlie? That ain’t no proper name for a girl. She’ll keep breathing in and out on a regular basis for a right smart while yet, ‘til she runs afoul of somebody meaner’n me who won’t tolerate that lip she’s got on her.”
He said nothing, just looked at her.
She returned his glare, then her stony stare softened about half a degree.
“Fair ‘nough,” she said and nodded.
She looked like she might even have been going to reach out to Malachi — oh, nothing so effusive as a hug. As far back as Malachi could recall, he’d never seen his mother hug anybody. A hand on his arm, though, maybe or—
Before she could move, a disheveled man rushed breathless into the courtroom. He looked like he’d been kicked in the face by a mule. His nose was smashed over onto his cheek, both eyes were black, his lip was busted, one of his front teeth was broken and there were four long scratches slicing down the whole length of his left cheek — the kinds of scratches made by a woman’s fingernails.
His left hand was crudely bandaged, gauze wrapped around his thumb.
Howie Witherspoon. The man who had killed Toby’s mother.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Stuart rode in the front seat of Jolene’s van as they headed down Route 17 south from the Middle of Nowhere. Cotton had given her Reece’s address, said it was the other side of Bennettville, but Jolene turned off almost immediately on Gallagher Station Road and Stuart was reluctant to point out that Cotton hadn’t gone this way. She must have noticed his discomfiture because she smiled.
“Cotton turned on Cicada Springs Road, didn’t he, farther down? There are half a dozen different ways to get from point A to point B in the mountains. Everybody has their own preference.”
They were silent then for a few minutes and Stuart found tension winding tighter with every mile, dread settling around him like ash out of the air after the eruption of a volcano.
“Why do you call it, whatever it is, the Jabberwock?” she asked.
“Because that’s what Shep Clayton called it and it appeared to me that maybe he’d actually met the gentleman.”
He told her the story of Shep and his newborn son, coming home to a hundred-year-old shack.
“Cotton and I went to visit him yesterday and he definitely doesn’t have both oars in the water. He said the ‘Jabberwock’ didn’t want us here, that it didn’t like for people to meddle in its affairs. That we should leave.”
“You don’t think he made it all up because he’s crazy, not that I wouldn’t be crazy if I were him.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Stuart paused. “But he said I shouldn’t go looking for Charlie and Merrie. There’s no way he could have known my little girl’s name unless—”
“The Jabberwock told him.”
When Jolene pulled the van off the highway and into an overgrown “driveway,” Stuart didn’t at first recognize the Tibbits house because he and Cotton had come from the opposite direction.
Jolene turned off the ignition, but made no effort to get out. Neither did Stuart.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
“I hoped it was just me.”
Oppression. Irrational fear. What he’d felt in the driveway of Charlie’s mother’s house.
Jolene opened her door and got out, Stuart did the same on the other side and they both sucked in a gasp. It was cold here. That was nuts because they were standing outside on a summer day and it’d been nudging ninety degrees when they left Jolene’s father’s house. It’d been cloudy, but not cold.
Stuart watched his breath frost in front of him.
“Didn’t think to pack my Nanook of the North coat,” Jolene said, as she came around the van to open the side cargo door. “Silly me.”
“Which one’s the flux capacitor?”
“The what?”
“The machine Marty McFly used to go back to the future. Making jokes keeps me from screaming.”
“Left my flux capacitor in my other suit.”
Stuart turned toward the house.
“I’d forgotten what a dump this was.” The roof over the front room of the house appeared to be stable, though the whole west end had collapsed, courtesy of a fallen tree that still lay there, toppled by some storm, or just died of old age. “Do we really have to go inside?”
“Yup. Inside is where the wild things are.”
Stuart was hammered by longing so powerful it felt like a physical blow. Where the Wild Things Are was Merrie’s favorite book.
There was no electricity here as there had been in Jolene’s father’s house — running water, too, all the comforts of home. But the equipment could run on battery power and the batteries were fully charged.
Stuart carefully stepped into the building, where the front door hung open on a lone rusty
hinge. The front room was rectangular, with the door on the far end of the east side. On the left side of the front door, a big hole yawned in the side of the building where there had once been a picture window, though not so much as a piece of broken glass remained now. Three door-less doorways lead out of the front room, two on the north side directly across from the front door and another in the west side. That one was an archway that probably lead into the dining room. They set up the equipment on the east wall. With no doorway, it provided a long bare spot where they could place the wheeled cart — which Stuart had to wrestle into the building because there was no sidewalk to roll it along.
The place smelled like a dank, cold cellar. Musty. But more than musty. It smelled like … Stuart backed up from the thought, from the memory of the dream of dead bodies.
“Think there’s a dead rat in here somewhere?” Jolene asked and he merely shrugged, not trusting himself to speak. “As cold as it is, maybe the thing’s been frozen for a hundred years and just thawed out.”
They quickly ferried in the equipment and placed it in position on the cart, both anxious to conduct their business and be gone. If Jolene had even hinted that she’d changed her mind, didn’t want to perform the experiments after all, Stuart would cheerfully have turned tail and run. She didn’t. Instead, she flipped switches, tinkered with settings, and the pleasant hum of the equipment coming to life helped mask what Stuart was steadfastly denying he could hear. Whispers. Voices.
“You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Jolene flipped three red switches in quick succession, then reached out and took his hand and pulled him with her away from the equipment into the middle of the room. She didn’t let go of his hand.