by Ronald Kelly
As Wendell gasped for breath, he saw the gentleman smile. Then he began to lift the minister off his feet. Wendell couldn’t believe what was happening. The old man couldn’t have been more than a hundred and sixty pounds, while Wendell was a good two forty or fifty. The ease with which the old man hefted him, and with only one hand, was impossible. But he was doing it nevertheless. It wasn’t long before Wendell hung suspended over the dewy grass at the edge of the parking lot, his shiny black shoes dangling a good six inches above the ground.
“Yes,” rasped the man with the thick mane of iron-gray hair. “You will do. You will do quite nicely.”
Then, before Wendell knew it, he was flying through the air, spinning head over heels toward the shadowy pines. He landed on his back in a bed of pine needles and lay there for a moment, his head spinning from lack of oxygen. He lifted a hand to his throat, then sat up. The man was walking toward him. Wendell could see how the man was dressed now. He was clad in a black suit and vest, with a collarless white shirt underneath, sort of like the Amish wore. Wendell had the impression that he didn’t belong to that faith, however.
The old man’s eyes glowed in the darkness, strangely red, like the eyes of a deer caught in the headlights of a car. “You are Wendell Craven?” he asked quietly.
It was a second before Wendell could talk. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.
“Son of Alfred and grandson of Thomas?”
Wendell swallowed, his throat sore from the rough treatment it had received. “That’s right,” he replied. “Who are you?”
“I’m family,” said the old man. Then, before Wendell knew it, he was upon him.
The minister attempted to fight the elderly man off. He kicked out wildly, trying to hit his attacker in the groin. But the blow was fended off with no trouble at all. Wendell flailed out with his fists. One caught the old man in the side of the face. It was like punching a side of cold, dead meat. Wendell expected him to fall back, but he didn’t. He glared at him as if he hadn’t even felt the blow.
“You’re not a very respectful young man,” hissed the old man. “Particularly toward your elders.” He reached out and caught Wendell’s flailing arms, imprisoning a wrist in each hand.
Wendell Craven pushed and pulled, trying to break free, but he found that he couldn’t. It was like the man’s icy hands were melded to his own flesh. He stared up into that lean, mustachioed face, and gradually, something began to surface in his mind. It was a moment before he realized what that something was. It was recognition. Dreadful, incredulous recognition.
“Josiah,” he muttered. “No.”
The man above him laughed. His features had transformed in an instant, changing from the stern face of an elderly gentleman to something horrid and demonic. His eyes were blood red now, with no signs of pupils, blazing like hot coals. The man’s teeth were now much longer and sharper than they had been a moment ago. The canines were particularly keen. Wendell watched in horrified amazement as they crept out of the pits of the man’s bloodless gums, lengthening, growing “as sharp as a two-edged sword,” as the Scriptures would say.
Then the fiend’s head dipped, ripping past the starched collar of Wendell’s shirt and into the flesh of his neck. The young minister wanted to scream to God for mercy, but only a whistle of air escaped his throat. As intense pain gave way to a cold numbness, he saw the night around him grow even darker. Then he saw nothing at all.
Chapter Thirteen
The wood felt good against Boyd’s hands. He ran his fingers along the grain of the oak plank, checking it for smoothness. His sanding had been flawless. There wasn’t a splinter or a rough spot to be found. Like his father had always said, “Treat the wood like a woman; stroke it gently, make love to it with your tools. The rougher you are, the cruder it’ll turn out, and believe me, folks will notice. Turn it as smooth as fire-blown glass. So smooth you can almost see yourself in it.”
Boyd smiled at that advice. Funny, how his father came so easily to mind when he was out there in his workshop. But then, it would’ve probably been strange if he didn’t. After all, Bud Andrews had been the one who had taught his son to make a living with wood.
He had been a carpenter himself; a burly, redheaded man with the swagger of a lumberjack and the tenderness of a priest—at least where wood was concerned. His family was a different matter. When Bud was on the job, hammering a stud or forming a piece of furniture out of raw wood and sweat, he was as patient and insightful as an artist. He was almost holy, in a strange way. But once he was away from his craft, his temper grew short and he hit the bottle. It didn’t matter what he drank; he guzzled Jack Daniel’s as easily as he did Budweiser. And when he was finished, he was ready to fight.
Boyd was usually the target. It would have probably been Bud’s wife, if she had been home half the time. But Sherry Andrews was hardly ever there. She would sleep until noon, watch her soap operas, then shower and primp. By the time Boyd got home from school, she was ready for another night out. She would leave a loaf of bread and a pound of bologna on the kitchen table, give Boyd a quick kiss, then jump in her VW bug and head for the Cheating Heart. That left Boyd behind to wait for his father and that telltale scowl of anguished frustration that usually heralded the consumption of a six-pack and a beating before the night was over.
Boyd’s fond memories abruptly turned into bitter ones. His father was a son-of-a-bitch, and that’s all there was to it. Sure, he might have been a different person when he had a plane or a piece of sandpaper in his hand, but one’s work doesn’t make one a saint. It is what sort of person one is away from the job, in the presence of his family, that mattered. And Bud Andrews had been a sterling example of how two-sided a man could be.
Once the old man had broken Boyd’s arm. He had gotten fed up with waiting up half the night for his unfaithful wife, and enraged, had burst into Boyd’s bedroom. Bud had grabbed his son out of his bed, twisting his arm until the bone fractured. Afterward, the carpenter had been sorry, had even cried when he drove Boyd to the emergency room at Sevierville. Boyd had been eleven then and he had never told anyone what had actually happened. He claimed that he had been sleepwalking and had fallen down the cellar steps. He would have liked to have thought it was out of love and loyalty to his father, but that wasn’t the case. It had been out of fear and fear alone. And even then, his lie hadn’t bought him any slack. He wasn’t even out of the cast before his father was at him again.
Boyd thought of his own kids. He would never have taken out his frustrations on Paul and Bessie, even when he was roaring drunk. Oh, he had spanked them a few times, but it was no more than that. He had never given them a black eye or a broken bone like his dear old dad had given him.
He laid his sanding block aside and turned to the stack of boards he had bought from Taylor’s lumberyard that afternoon. He had already finished cutting the sides, base, and lid for the coffin and was now in the process of finishing the wood. Dud Craven probably didn’t expect a perfect job, but Boyd could expect no less from himself. He had been like his father in that respect, at least. After the sanding had been completed and he had nailed the walls and base together, he would install the lid and iron hinges—which he’d found at the True Value downtown—then rub the wood with a coating of linseed oil.
Boyd took a break from his work for a while. He took a seat on the barstool and reached for a bottle of Nehi Orange that sat on the workbench. He had a jar of Caleb’s moonshine out in his truck, but had decided to leave it there. He still felt bad about going back on his promise the night before. And besides, his stomach hadn’t been up to par since.
Boyd thought of how the Andrews family had ended up. His mother had run off with a cross-country trucker when he was sixteen, leaving him and his father to fend for themselves, as if they hadn’t been already. When Boyd turned eighteen, he joined the service, mostly to get away from his abusive father than anything else. He stayed in four years, working for the Army Corps of Engineers, building Quonset huts an
d latrines. When he returned home to Green Hollow, too big and too strong to be a victim anymore, the threat had already passed. Bud Andrews was a drunken shell of a man who had abandoned his love of carpentry and exchanged it for an existence of boozing, chain-smoking, and self-pity.
A year after that, Bud had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Boyd had tried to make his peace with the old man, but Bud was more stubborn sick than healthy. He rejected Boyd’s offers of help, declaring that he could take care of his own damned self. Boyd stood by helplessly, watching as the big man rotted away, little by little. He remembered the last time he had seen his father alive. He had been lying in that hospital bed up in Sevierville, hooked up to more IVs than Boyd could count, looking ninety years old instead of fifty. That last moment had been the worse. Bud had reached out and patted Boyd’s arm—the one he had broken thirteen years before—and simply said “Sorry.” Then he had died.
Boyd took a sip of the soda and put his father out of his mind. Instead, he turned his thoughts to his life after Bud’s death. He had made a living as a carpenter, a hammer in his hand by day and a beer bottle down at the Cheating Heart by night. He gained quite a reputation around town as a woman-chaser and a hell-raiser. Boyd seemed destined to become a composite of his mother and father, living only for sex and liquor. Then, later that year, something occurred that prevented that from happening.
He was doing some carpentry in town, putting in the framework for a new automatic teller machine at the Green Hollow Bank and Trust, when he met Joan Craven. He remembered the young woman; she had been a couple of grades behind him in school and had always been considered one of the “nice” girls. They got to talking during her lunch break, then began to go out. A month later, they got married on a whim. Knowing that Joan’s mother, Blanche, wouldn’t approve of the union, they drove to Gatlinburg and were wed there.
A few weeks later, Joan came home from the doctor with a big grin on her face and a baby rattle in her hand. She was pregnant with Paul. Boyd had mixed reactions to the news at first; he was both overjoyed and scared shitless. He and Joan were just starting out, and what they both made hardly paid their rent and utilities. Times had been tough for a couple of years, then Joan had been promoted to head teller and Boyd had been hired by a big contractor in Sevierville. They put in for a loan, and by the time Bessie came along, Boyd had finished the house on Stantonview Road.
All went well until the bottom fell out of the construction business in Sevier County. Boyd had lost his job and was only able to find temporary work. He had grown up with the Southern frame of mind that the male of the family was the provider, and when his ability to do that became practically nonexistent, he grew more and more depressed. He also began to spend more of his time at the Cheating Heart, wasting what money he did earn on hard liquor and sad songs on the jukebox. Slowly, he began to lose the trust of his wife and the respect of his children. It had all come to an explosive head that December night just after Christmas, when he had come home drunk and found himself sitting in the snow a few minutes later.
Boyd thought about the last three months and how hard he had worked to lift himself up during that time. Then yesterday had turned into a hell of a mess, both with his job and his family, and his resistance had dropped to rock bottom. He had fallen to self-pity—just as his father had—and gone to Eagle Point, telling himself that it was just to talk to Caleb and let off some steam. But he had known what he was going there for before he’d even reached the highway. He was going there to get pickled to the gills.
He had ended up doing just that, but what had it gotten him? He had returned to Green Hollow sick, ashamed, and feeling just as bad as he had when he had left.
“You’re gonna do it this time, Andrews,” he said. “I swear you are.” He picked up the Orange Crush and made a toast. “Day one.”
He took a big swallow of the soda, then hopped down off his stool and went back to work.
Chapter Fourteen
Stan Watts sat in his easy chair feeling far from easy in his mind. It had been a long day—a very rough and disheartening day—and not only at the scene of the crime behind the drive-in concession stand. The worst part about the murder of Jamie Bell was breaking the news to those who loved the girl most. Jay Mathers had finally located the Bells around noon and told them of Jamie’s death. Nancy Bell had gone into hysteria and had to be sedated at a Florida hospital. Jim had told Jay that they would be flying home in the morning, but it could be sooner if they managed to book an earlier flight.
Stan had hated telling his own daughter the most. He sat in the recliner and listened. He could still hear Lisa in her upstairs bedroom, sobbing like a baby. It hurt to hear her suffering, but he didn’t know what to do about it. She and Jamie had been best friends since kindergarten. Actually, they had been more like sisters. The first half hour after he had told her had been the worst. Lisa had screamed at the top of her lungs and Stan had been afraid they would have to take her to the hospital in Sevierville to get her calmed down. But eventually her horror had turned to grief and the tears had come. They had continued all that afternoon and hadn’t let up yet. Stan’s wife, Beth, was up there comforting their daughter right now. More than likely, she would be there most of the night.
Stan thought of what they had found during that day’s investigation… or, more precisely, what they hadn’t found. There had been no footprints other than Jamie’s, no incriminating fibers clinging to trees or bushes. There should have been a hell of a lot of blood, considering the condition Jamie’s body was found in, but strangely enough, there was very little. Stan had found only a few drops on a couple of dead leaves and a bloodstain the size of a quarter on the collar of the letterman jacket. Other than that, nothing of interest had been discovered.
There had been two other homicides in the jurisdiction of Green Hollow since Stan had joined the force in 1972. One had been a domestic incident; a woman had struck her tomcatting husband in the head with an iron skillet just a little too hard, splitting his skull and splattering most of his brains across the kitchen wall. The other had been at the Smoky Mountain Motel out on Highway 321. A woman in her mid-twenties had been found handcuffed and beaten to death in one of the rooms. They had later discovered that her boyfriend had been a major cocaine dealer in Miami and he had murdered her for a double-cross she had pulled. By the time Stan had received the information, the dealer was already dead, having been shot down by DEA agents during a drug bust in the Everglades.
But the killing of Jamie Bell was worse than both of those combined. First of all, the victim had been a girl the whole town had loved and admired. Jamie had been an honor student and a cheerleader for the Green Hollow Gladiators, both the football and the basketball teams. Her death would certainly leave a big hole in her tenth-grade class, as well as in the hearts of those who were around her daily. And that included Lisa most of all.
Second, the fact that the crime had taken place at all made it particularly horrible. A body discovered with every drop of blood drained from it might not seem so unusual in a place like New York or Chicago, but in a little tourist town like Green Hollow it was devastating. The thought of some nutcase roaming among them with a sadistic streak and a taste for blood sent most folks in town into an understandable panic. Stan also had to face the fact that it could have happened to anyone and not just Jamie Bell. The drive-in was a hangout for a lot of people on the weekend, adults and kids alike. There had been many a Saturday night that Lisa had accompanied her friends to the movies. A chill ran through Stan when he realized that it could very well have been his own daughter lying out there in the woods with a piece bitten out of the side of her neck.
Stan was jolted from his thoughts by the ringing of the phone. “I’ll get it!” he called upstairs, then reached over and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
There was a second of hesitation on the other end, then a familiar voice. “Uh, Stan? This is John Prichard. Sorry to call you at home, but I thought this was importa
nt.”
Stan sensed by the tone of the coroner’s voice that something was wrong. “What’s going on, John? You sound upset.”
“Well, it’s got to do with the Bell girl.”
“What about her?” asked the police chief. He remembered the question he had asked Prichard about sexual assault and felt his heart sink.
The medical examiner didn’t say what Stan had expected him to, though. “It’s her body, Stan,” said Prichard. “It’s turned up missing.”
“Missing?” asked Stan in shock. “Are you sure?”
“Well, it could have been misplaced, stashed somewhere by one of the staff at the hospital here, but we haven’t been able to find it yet.”
“Jesus, John!” Stan whispered into the phone. If Lisa overheard, she would likely go off the deep end again. “You’ve got to find her. Her folks are flying in first thing in the morning.”
“I’m trying,” the coroner said wearily. “I’ve got orderlies searching every nook and cranny.”
Stan shook his head. What a damned mess! “How did it happen, John?”
“Beats me,” said Prichard. “After I left with the body this morning, I took it to Sevierville Hospital, just like I always do. I use their morgue facilities to perform my autopsies. Well, I finished by six o’clock and decided to run home to eat supper. I put the Bell girl’s body in one of the refrigerated drawers, intending to come back later and finish my paperwork. I got back to the hospital a little after eight, but when I opened the drawer, it was empty. The body was gone. I asked around, but everyone on duty claimed that no one entered the morgue after I left at six. And that isn’t all, either.”
“What do you mean?” asked Stan.
“Her clothes have turned up missing, too. The letterman jacket and all the rest. They were in a plastic bag, lying on the instrument table, when I left. But they’re gone now.”