by Ninie Hammon
She had only a couple of days left to do what she had to do.
Raylynn rubbed her face hard with the towel hanging on the rack, scrubbed at it. Then she turned off the tap and stepped out into the hallway. She could hear Sam’s voice in the breakroom, talking to Thelma Jackson, Malachi and Charlie. Raylynn slipped silently down the hallway past the almost-closed door, past the front of the clinic where there were no patients right now in the waiting room to the big exam room on the end. That’s where Sam hung up what she called her pretending-I’m-a-doctor white lab coat.
Slipping her hand into the pocket of the coat, Raylynn found the bottle of pills. The pills Malachi had given Sam to use to alleviate E.J.’s pain. The don’t-ask-me-where-I-got-this bottle of pure oxycontin.
She quickly unscrewed the lid and dropped two pills out into her palm from the bottle. Stood for a moment thinking, then dropped out one more.
She didn’t know how much it would take for the dose to be fatal, but she couldn’t take so many that Sam would notice they were gone. In a real hospital, where there might possibly be drug-addicted patients or staff, narcotics were locked away. The only locked safe in the Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic was where E.J. kept his “horse tranquilizer” because he’d read somewhere that there were idiots out there stupid enough to shoot up with it. Sam didn’t use the safe for the oxycontin. She carried a bottle in her pocket and Raylynn could only hope that Sam didn’t know exactly how many pills were in it. After all, it wasn’t a prescription bottle with the number of tablets printed clearly on the label, and Malachi had promised an “unlimited supply” of the drugs, so she didn’t have to keep track — he’d provide more when this bottle ran low.
Raylynn had to find out how many pills it took for a fatal dose. And then, she had to find a way to come by twice that amount. E.J. wouldn’t die alone. When she gave E.J. the pills to end his life, she intended to have a handful of her own to take when he took his.
They would die together.
Chapter Seventeen
Sam was listening to Thelma Jackson’s recounting of the history of Gideon and the town that’d sat on the same spot a hundred years before it when she heard the commotion out in the hallway and her gut yanked into a knot. It was a crisis of some kind. An emergency. And odds were she was about to be asked to function as if she were a doctor — any number of doctors, actually, when you counted the illnesses, injuries and diagnoses she’d been required to make just like she was a fully staffed medical clinic instead of a lone EPN, hanging out here by herself without even a veterinarian to help her make medical decisions.
A timid knock announced that Raylynn was on the other side, loath to interrupt what she understood were probably the most important conversations in the whole county. But she’d knocked, so it must be—
The door opened slightly and Raylynn peeked into the room.
“Sam … I hate to interrupt but … we got … Skeeter Burkett and Ed Reynolds just brought in … a body. Skeeter pulled it out of the river.” She paused, took a breath and whispered urgently, “Sam, I think it might be Reverend Norman’s girl, Hayley.”
The others in the room turned to Raylynn in alarm. Everybody knew Hayley was missing. Her father, Reverend Duncan Norman, had questioned just about every person who’d been at Viola’s kangaroo court at the courthouse yesterday, saying he couldn’t find her.
When Hayley’d ridden the Jabberwock to the Middle of Nowhere on J-Day, she had been on her way to Lexington to get an abortion. She’d told Sam that, but Sam suspected she hadn’t shared it with anybody else. Like everybody who took a Jabberwock trip, her vehicle had vanished in a puff of smoke. And apparently she had taken the family’s only other vehicle to go wherever it was she’d gone on Saturday. Members of Rev. Norman’s small congregation had been driving him around so he could look for her.
Sam didn’t stop to question why Skeeter and Ed had brought the body to the veterinary clinic, specifically to Sam. She was all there was, the only medical care of any kind in the county, and by default she’d somehow become the go-to person for anybody in crisis. Viola Tackett may have set herself up as the “law” in Nowhere County, but without lifting a finger, Sam Sheridan had become the resident “authority.” The one who would have responded if you’d dialed 911.
Gratefully, Malachi stepped in to orchestrate what came next, directing Thelma and Raylynn to stay inside while he and Sam went outside with Skeeter to the front parking lot, where a large lump of something lay covered in a tarp in the bed of Ed Reynolds’s pickup truck. Charlie had tagged along with them and Malachi didn’t challenge her.
“Ain’t no way to be sure it’s Hayley,” Skeeter said softly. He didn’t look good, like maybe he was about to throw up. “You’ll see.”
When Ed pulled back the tarp, Sam did see and she took an involuntary step back. Charlie squeaked out a little scream and turned away. The woman who lay in a wet heap had been dead several days, and the ravages of decomposition would have made identifying her unpleasant in the best of circumstances. But even if she’d been fished out of the water five minutes after she went in, she still wouldn’t have been recognizable. Her face was gone, nothing on the front of her head but the crushed remains of a nose, mouth and eyes. It looked like she had slammed into a brick wall face-first going sixty miles an hour.
“Found her in the river downstream from Scott’s Ridge. I only thought it was Hayley because—” Skeeter pointed to the ring stuck on the pudgy little finger of her right hand. It was a small gold band with a raised disc the size of a dime with an inlaid cross and the letters PHPC. Praying Hands Pentecostal Church. “Maybe they’s a lot of rings like that out there, I don’t know. But …” He gestured to the huge bloated body. “I mean … look at her. Ain’t any other girl I know in Nowhere County fat as that.”
Yes, it was Hayley Norman alright.
Sam shook her head to clear it, but could do nothing about the tears that had formed instantly in her eyes. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Malachi patted gently.
“Sorry you got stuck with all this,” he said.
She wanted to melt in a puddle. Hayley Norman’s dead, mutilated body was bad enough without the emotional upheaval of having to deal with Malachi Tackett on top of it. But she couldn’t just shrug his hand off, much as she wanted to. Except, of course, she didn’t want to. Which was the reason she needed to.
She shook her head again, heard fill-the-awkward-silence words tumble out of her mouth in a whisper.
“She was pregnant.”
Malachi’s eyebrows shot up but he made no comment.
“That’s where she was going on J-Day. To Lexington to … get rid of it.”
“But she wound up in the Middle of Nowhere instead,” Charlie said, and Sam realized then that Charlie had stepped up to stand beside her. She was so grateful she almost reached out to clasp Charlie’s hand.
“On Saturday, Hayley asked me to do it. To … you know …”
“Perform an abortion,” Charlie finished for her.
“She was devastated when I said no. She must have been so desperate … what else could she do but …?”
Though Sam didn’t think anyone had ever done it, the Scott’s Ridge Overlook had always seemed to be a Lover’s Leap kind of location. Jump off and it’s a drop straight down into the river — into the big rocks clotting the river beneath the overlook. Not survivable.
“She didn’t leap off Scott’s Ridge,” Malachi said. “She didn’t commit suicide.”
How did he know she was thinking …? She just looked at him questioningly.
“You don’t get injuries like that jumping off a cliff, not even if you land on your face.” He gestured, keeping his voice low. “Both the front and the back of her head are bashed in. Hard to do that in a fall unless you bounce off something on the way down and she didn’t. She didn’t kill herself. Somebody beat her to death.”
Sam sucked in a gasp.
“You’re saying somebody murdered …?”
“She tell you who the father of the baby was?”
“No, just called him Sugar Bear.”
“Hayley was what? Sixteen?” Charlie said. “Safe money’s on Sugar Bear is a married man and wanted her to get the abortion, maybe even gave her the money to pay for it, and when she couldn’t … If Liam were here, that’s where he’d start looking.”
“But he’s not.” Sam heard sadness wrapped up in anger in her own voice and she was glad of it.
“And the ‘law’ in this county right now doesn’t give a rip,” Malachi said and she was glad he said it so she didn’t have to.
“What are we supposed to do with … where do we take the body?” Skeeter wanted to know.
“Bascum’s,” Sam said. The failed funeral home was a growing concern now.
“You need any help?” Malachi asked Sam and she gave him a blank look. “You know … telling her family.”
The bottom dropped out of Sam’s belly and she felt her knees go weak. She didn’t wobble, though; she was proud of that. But she only shook her head because she didn’t trust herself to speak.
Yep, that job had fallen to her, too. Notifying the families of the dead. Who else was there to do it?
Where did it end?
It didn’t. Never would unless the Breakfast Club could come up with more answers than they had right now.
“I’ll go with you,” Charlie said softly beside her and Sam did take her hand then and squeezed it.
“Thanks, but I don’t need any help.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you do.”
Sam had never loved Charlie more than she did at that moment.
“I’m coming with you and we best go right now before news hits the phone tree.”
“Are you going to tell them … all of it?” Malachi asked.
She looked from Malachi to Charlie. Should she share with Hayley’s parents that she had been pregnant? That she had been murdered?
What was the point?
She was grateful that Malachi agreed.
“When we get out of here,” he looked pointedly from Sam to Charlie and back to Sam, “then maybe we’ll need to share all we know about a lot of things.” He paused and she watched his face. He appeared to put something together in his head before he continued. “Even then … I don’t think the part about Hayley will matter. I think maybe justice has already been served.”
Sam had no idea what he was talking about and both she and Charlie started to ask, but he held up his hand in a “not-now” gesture. “Why make the death of their only child harder on the Normans than it’s already going to be?”
Charlie nodded agreement.
Malachi gestured toward Skeeter and Ed Reynolds — standing off to the side by themselves. “I’ll give them a hand with the body.”
“I guess we need to give Lester a call, give him a heads-up,” Charlie said.
A rhyme Sam had heard from her grandmother flashed into her mind. “Be the job great or small, if you do it too well, you get stuck with it all.” That had certainly been the case with Sam in the past two weeks and it had happened to Lester Peetree, too. Lester ran the hardware store, had gone to Charlie’s after … after what happened with Abby Clayton, and took the kiln door off the hinges. The most remarkable thing about Lester Peetree was that there was absolutely nothing remarkable about him at all. He was quintessentially ordinary. Except he wasn’t. Though he had an easily forgettable face and a soft voice, Lester Peetree was a go-to guy, the man you could always depend on in a crisis. Not flashy, tended to hover out there beyond the circle of “people in charge,” Lester would crawl over ten miles of razor blades and rusty can lids to keep a promise. At forty-seven, he shaved his head to hide creeping baldness, and always wore long-sleeved shirts to cover the scars from shrapnel wounds he’d gotten in Vietnam. Though it was rumored he’d come back from the war with a pocketful of medals for valor, it was hard for Sam to imagine him as the “certifiable badass” Liam said he’d been, a sniper with dozens of confirmed kills.
Lester had been friends with Herb Bascum, the mortician who owned the funeral home that’d closed years ago. They’d gone to boot camp together after they’d been drafted in 1967. When the Jabberwock claimed its first victim on J-Day, they’d taken Willie Cochran’s body to Bascum’s and Lester’d unlocked the building, made sure the refrigeration units that’d been sitting unused all these years still worked. The funeral home was only a couple of doors down from the hardware store and Herb had given Lester a key so he could use the back room there to store bags of fertilizer. Lester’d kept the electricity turned on.
In the new normal of post J-Day reality in Nowhere County, Lester Peetree was now in charge of the growing population of bodies in refrigerated drawers in Bascum’s basement.
“Let me go make sure the self-appointed veterinary clinic manager can hang out with Raylynn for a while,” Charlie said. “I’ll call Lester and be right back.”
Sam was grateful for the time Charlie took to arrange things for Merrie. She needed the few minutes to get her emotional ducks in a row.
What should she say? What could she say?
She hadn’t been trained for something like this, any more than she’d been trained for the other tasks she’d performed with a gun to her head in the past two weeks. Falling back on a half-hour lecture once on delivering bad news, she concentrated on the basics. Short simple sentences. No hemming and hawing. Say what you have to say kindly, but unequivocally. Then just listen.
Okay, she could do that.
A sardonic laugh died in her throat. Right. Like she had a choice.
Chapter Eighteen
Shep Clayton was only ever around Abby’s Uncle Virgil, her mama’s brother, at cock fights. Last time Shep seen him, Virgil had started a brawl when his bird lost, busted a chair over some fella’s head. Fella was still in a bad way, or so Shep’d heard.
Abby’d told Shep and her crazy older brother Claude, yesterday, that they was s’posed to do something about them as was making trouble for the Jabberwock — Cotton Jackson, Stuart McClintock and Pete Rutherford’s daughter, Jolene. Soon’s she did, Claude had called his uncle, asked Virgil could he round up some boys and could they meet at Virgil’s house at noon today. Didn’t say nothing about why.
Shep, Abby and most of Abby’s kin — aunts, uncles, cousins and such — lived in and around Poorfolk Hollow in southwest Nowhere County, on the far side of Hollow Tree Ridge. Her mama’d been Winona Hannaker, and over the years a whole passel of that side of the family had spread out ‘til some of them was on the Drayton County side of the hollow. Them folks hadn’t lost nothing. ‘Course they was well aware of what’d happened in Nowhere County — more’n half the family was there. Except they wasn’t there. Not anymore, they wasn’t.
Virgil’s wife, Pauline, had laid out a spread and Shep could smell the apple pie from the front porch.
“Ya’ll want to pass them black-eyed peas on down to this side of the table,” said Claude, sitting there in the big chair at the end across from his uncle, taking it as his right and due soon’s he walked in the door. Shep didn’t think none of his kin had visited Claude when he was in that nut house, so it’d been years since they’d set eyes on him, but now that he was home, he acted like he’d never left, like all the rest of the family’d ought to do for him because he was Winona’s oldest. It was clear quick that didn’t none of them want anything to do with Claude. He always had been odd, and odd had over time turned into peculiar in a bad way and after a while the family was … say the truth of it, scared to be around him. Wasn’t nobody shed no tears when they heard he’d been locked away for hacking his drug-dealing partners to death with a hatchet, and Shep was sure wasn’t none of them doing no happy dance when they found out he’d come back home.
Shep was only here cause Abby’d told him to come. It wasn’t up to Shep no more what he said or didn’t say, nor what he done. Abby was the one deciding things now. The Abby that was in his head who didn’t h
ave Abby’s bird-chirp voice was calling the shots. Shep was sitting on the sidelines. She’d told Shep not to pay no mind to that Stuart McClintock fella as had come by to visit him on Saturday evening. Said he was married to Charlie Ryan — him a black man and her white. That absolutely was not right and Abby’d said as much, but that wasn’t why she didn’t want Shep to listen to what the man had to say. She said it was Charlie McClintock coming home that’d caused all the trouble in the first place! Abby said the Jabberwock had been waiting for her and her friends — and everybody else in the county just got locked up right along with them.
The whole thing was Charlie McClintock’s fault!
Abby told Shep that Charlie’s husband, Stuart, had flown in from Chicago and was digging around in things that didn’t concern him. She said Shep’d ought to run him off the way he’d run off a weasel that got in the chicken house.
Then Claude Letcher’d came strolling into Shep and Abby’s house yesterday — the house that wasn’t no house no more. Abby started talking to her big brother outta Shep’s mouth, told him all kinda things Shep didn’t know about what had happened and why. And who was responsible. And what she wanted him and Claude to do about it. She got real specific — which meant they had to lay their hands on some guns. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been no thang. Shep had all kinda guns — shot rabbits and squirrels and deer to put meat on the table like everybody else in the county did. Shep’s guns had vanished with Abby and the house.
But her kin had guns. That’s why him and Claude had come to see her Uncle Virgil.
And now they sat there at the table in Uncle Virgil’s kitchen, talking with Claude and Abby’s cousins, Billy Ray and Doodlebug Hannaker, and a couple of friends, Ronnie Potter and Jim Bob Claywell — who’d helped Shep run the McGinty tractor into a creek when they was drunk teenagers. Ronnie and Jim Bob both lived in Nowhere County but they’d been away — likely out somewhere selling weed — and come home to find their families gone, same as Shep had.