by Ninie Hammon
The school building had been spared the vandalism that’d chewed up the other abandoned structures in the county due to its strategic location across the street from the courthouse that housed the sheriff’s department. There were plenty of other windows to break out, walls to spray paint, and bridge abutments to deface without risking getting caught by the law. So the building stood mostly untouched, by people, anyway. But time and age and the elements had done plenty of touching, had touched the roof with leaks that’d made huge brown circles on the ceiling high above the auditorium floor where the seats had been removed years ago. The doors were padlocked shut, but anybody’d wanted to get in bad enough coulda done it because the wood in the doors and the jambs was rotting away.
You could hear the crowd out there, but wasn’t no gaiety to the sound. Onliest time there was ever that many nowhere people all together in one place was at whoop-ti-doos, and there hadn’t been one of them here in twenty years. They’d been a good time, though, them whoop-ti-doos. Mountain folk from all over would gather in some hollow that had a good-sized piece of flat land. Somebody’d dig a big pit, fill it with the right kinda wood — oak and hickory for the heat, cedar for the seasoning — with charcoal on top and there’d be an animal carcass on a spit over the pit, with a crank on the end so’s you could turn it slow-like, get it done even on all the sides. There’d also be a bucket with a mop in it so’s you could slather what was in the bucket on the meat as it cooked — some special kinda barbecue sauce some granny up in the hills had a recipe for that’d died with her and couldn’t nobody ever make it again.
There’d be tables set up somebody’d snatched out of the basement of one of the closed churches, piled high with all kinda food — fried okra, grits, greens, beans cooked with a ham hock, blackberry cobbler — mountain food, and the nature of a “covered-dish” social was such that every cook wanted to out-do every other one, so whatever they brung was the best thing they knew how to make and the whole of it was a feast fit for a king.
Or a queen.
The queen of Nowhere. That’s what Viola Tackett was gonna be. Not yet, but soon. Yeah, very soon. Tonight was the beginning of it all.
Tonight’s meeting had been called by Sebastian Nower, but the idea’d been Liam Montgomery’s and if he hadn’t come up with it like he done Viola woulda had to orchestrate that part, too. It was better this way, her not having nothing to do with the meeting, just come here like ever’body else to try to put they heads together and figure things out. And anything else that happened … well, it was just — what was the word? Spontaneous. Yeah, spontaneous,
She’d come in the door that led to the stage in front of the auditorium so she could make sure all the pieces was in place, all the folks was where they was supposed to be, wanted to check now so’s she could fix it if one of the dumb-as-a-brick hillbillies wound up on the wrong side of the room.
Nower was preening like a peacock, so glad to be in charge of something he was like to wet his pants.
Sebastian Nower, who lived in the big three-story house on Hawthorne Lane in the Ridge. One of the last remaining fancy homes that’d once been scattered all over the Ridge and into some of the other communities in the county. Back when things was going well and the Ridge had been a real town and the county wasn’t sliding down a greasy slope toward nowhere at all.
She’d set her heart on that house first time she ever seen it more than half a century ago, all decked out like it was for Christmas, with candles in all the windows. And her outside on the street ‘cause Mama’d brought the little’uns in so the church could give them Christmas presents their parents couldn’t afford. They done that for several poor families … made them grovel and say thank you and kiss everybody’s butt and be properly grateful that them high-and-mighty folks had taken the time out of their busy, important lives to go buy a junk toy from the Five-and-Dime to give to kids who needed a pair of shoes and a warm coat a whole lot worse.
She’d stared up at that house, hadn’t never seen nothing in all her six years of drawing breath so grand as it was. And she felt a yearning she didn’t even know how to feel because until that time she hadn’t never seen nothing in her world worth the wanting of it. But she wanted that, she wanted to be a little girl dressed in a lacy white dress, putting on airs with the kinds of folks who told folks like her what to do.
She’d slipped away then, couldn’t help herself, went around the back of the house and peeked in one of the windows where the drapes was open. Just had to get a look, only a peek into such a marvel that she couldn’t imagine real people lived there.
Then that fella grabbed her by the ear, worked for the Nower family he did, and yelled at her for trampling the flower bed though it was wintertime and wasn’t no flowers growing there. He’d hauled her out to the street and called out,
“This one belong to any of you?”
Her mama had stepped forward to claim her and the man shoved Viola at her, then looked down at his own hand and said, “That child needs a bath!”
He’d glanced around at the handful of people who’d happened to be on the street. “It’s no sin to be poor, but soap’s cheap.”
And they all grinned at each other and at him, signifying that they knew the likes of her could have afforded to be clean if they’d chosen to be, and were dirty because they was just dirty people, that was all. Lowlifes.
The man had informed her mother all haughty-like that she could take her brood and leave, clearly undeserving as they was of the generosity of their betters. They didn’t have no Christmas whatsoever ‘cause of what she done. It just passed like any other day, and they lived through it like any other one, cold and hungry.
The Nower House was a symbol of all that Viola Tackett shoulda had in her life but didn’t, but was gonna finally have now at the end of it, no matter what she had to do or who she had to step on to do it.
Gratified that her peek through the auditorium curtains had revealed that nobody was out of place, she let the curtains fall shut and motioned for the boys to come with her across the stage and out the little door to the auditorium off the side so wouldn’t nobody notice. They would make their way to the back of the room so’s she would be in place when the show started at 6:30.
Chapter Twenty
Sam kept turning around, craning to see. And her height afforded her some advantage in that endeavor. As the room filled with people, she watched the doorway for Malachi’s appearance. Sam had watched out the window of the clinic and saw him and Roscoe Tungate drive away to search for Harry, certain theirs was a hopeless errand. If Harry’s house had “aged,” it wasn’t likely they were going to find Harry out for a stroll or down at the creek fishing.
Harry had vanished.
And what, exactly, did “vanished” mean? If the people were gone, where did they go? And how did they get there? And what did it mean that their houses aged, a process for which Sam had a morbid fascination — a ridiculously creepy desire to watch the transformation, to witness the process. And why those particular people? Abner Riley … okay, he did, after all, live in Fearsome Hollow, and to Sam that one characteristic was enough to explain any out-of-the-ordinary experience. She’d finally gotten to hear the whole story about what had happened when Charlie, Malachi and the Tungates went there looking for Abner. The mist. The sparkling black forms. Whispers. Wails. The car picked up and moved!
But Harry Tungate didn’t live in Fearsome Hollow. Neither did Reece Tibbits. Liam had gotten sidetracked by a murder, and hadn’t yet had time to tell Grace that her son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters were … gone.
Rodney Sentry, the pig farmer who’d stayed at the Middle of Nowhere to help out on J-Day, was missing, too. He lived with his elderly mother on a farm on Oldham Pike in Sawmill Hollow. Liam said the house now looked a hundred years old. And the Crumps. Willard and Ethel lived on Wiley Road on the other side of the covered bridge. Ethel’d stayed hidden in their basement the first week after J-Day, but had promised her sist
er Margaret she’d help her finish up a quilt two days ago. When Ethel didn’t show up, Margaret sent her husband, Willie, to check and he’d said the Crump house had become a dilapidated shack. Or so said Margaret, who’d told her neighbor Agnes Wheatley, who’d told her cousin, Gladys Copley, who had told her best friend, Effie Bennett, who had told her niece Raylynn, who had told Sam this morning at the clinic.
It was possible Abby Clayton’s had been the first house to undergo the transformation. After she … died, a couple of her sisters and a brother — her mother was dead and her wack-job father was blessedly out of the county — had gone to her house. Certainly not to find something to dress her in for the funeral, which was not an open casket affair. And they’d reported — hysterically, as Sam heard it from Liam — that Abby and Shep’s little house in Poorfolk Hollow was not the house Abby had left the morning of J-Day to buy onesies at the Dollar General Store.
Charlie and Merrie appeared at Sam’s side. Rusty had not come with Sam to the meeting, begged off with some excuse that was clearly an excuse and they both knew it. He didn’t want to go and she wouldn’t force him, but she would do her best to force out of him later why he hadn’t wanted to attend. The boy was withdrawn, seemed to have been pulling away from her ever since … No, that wasn’t fair. His response to the craziness was certainly a normal one and she needed to give him space and “permission” to feel whatever he was feeling. And she needed to spend more time with him, be available for when he opened up. More time than what she’d squeezed into this afternoon. She was neglecting her son — she was! And whenever the realization struck her she was remorseful and ashamed. And vowed to do better. But then another emergency …
“You’re easy to pick out in a crowd,” Charlie told her, gesturing at her red hair. “You’d make a lousy ‘Where's Waldo?’”
“Have you seen Malachi, heard anything about Harry Tungate?”
“No and no.”
“Why couldn’t I stay at the click-click?” Merrie asked Charlie. Click-click was her word for the animal clinic. “I wanted to play wiff the puppies!” Then she stuck out her lip in a pout. When that little girl turned on the charm she was absolutely irresistible, but she was clearly a “strong-willed child,” a handful, and Sam suspected Charlie had once been better at reining her in. Sam knew the experience of believing the child was dead still haunted Charlie, though, and she gave the child more rope than she should have.
“I told you, honey. Miss Raylynn is busy looking after E.J. She doesn’t have time to babysit you, too.”
“I need to go potty.”
Charlie rolled her eyes at Sam and led the child off into the crowd.
The room was filling up fast. Everyone was standing, of course, because the auditorium seats had been removed after someone tried to set them on fire years ago and they’d never been replaced. Why bother?
Why bother? The words hung on a nail in Sam’s head. That seemed to be the knee-jerk response to just about everything that was broken in the whole county. Why bother? Nobody cared.
Somehow that set off a soft, clanging alarm in Sam’s head. Maybe she’d missed her calling as an advertising copywriter.
The slogan for the Jabberwock: When you dial 911, nobody comes.
The slogan for Nowhere County: Why bother?
She had never before given consideration to how folks felt about Nowhere County. It was the canvas on which all their lives were painted: why bother? In some convoluted way she couldn’t explain, she had a niggling suspicion that the sentiment expressed by the slogan had come back to bite all of them in the butt.
There’d been seating for 600 in the auditorium, so without seats the same space could easily accommodate twice that many. And if folks jammed in around where the seats had been, in the aisles and the back of the room … there was definitely enough space for any county residents who wanted to attend.
Viola Tackett and three of her boys appeared out the door from backstage. She wondered how much Malachi was involved in his mother’s businesses. He had come home so “disabled” from Rwanda, she got the sense that he didn’t do much of anything. Which begged the question: Did Viola know Malachi was going to speak tonight? If so, did she know what he was going to say? Had they talked about it? She suspected not.
Turning around, she scanned the people coming through the two big doors in the back of the room. She spotted Rev. Norman and his wife Sophie and wondered if Hayley’d yet told them she was pregnant. Not likely. The couple was as somber as everybody else, far too composed for parents who’d just found out their sixteen-year-old daughter was going to have a baby.
The crowd had been “summoned” the same way they’d been warned about the Jabberwock. Phone trees almost explained it, but not quite. Sometimes Sam believed in the hundredth monkey … the philosophy that if ninety-nine monkeys know a thing the other one will know it too, just because the rest do. Mountain folk were intensely clannish, stuck to their own, their hollow, their mountain, their families. But if the lines were drawn between mountain folk and the rest of the world, they’d all line up together on the same side. The Jabberwock had done that to them.
The old voice of the public address system, that, in Sam’s memory, had never turned on without the awful feedback squawk, focused everyone’s eyes on the front of the room. Liam Montgomery was there standing beside Sebastian Nower, who had chosen his attire for the occasion as if he had come to be presented an Oscar. She knew Liam planned to rein in the old man before he could get on a roll, had seemed confident that he could manage it when he’d stopped by the clinic earlier with the bad news about Martha Whittiker. The old woman’s murder — murder! — had galvanized his determination to assert his legal authority. And his moral authority. He was “the law” and Sam knew he intended to man up to that responsibility.
The only question was: could he pull it off?
“Good evening, folks, thanks for coming,” Liam said into the squawky microphone.
Charlie and Merrie rejoined Sam, who craned her neck at the doors.
Where was Malachi?
Chapter Twenty-One
Sugar Bear was so sweet!
Hayley’d gotten a lump in her throat as soon as he told her where he wanted her to meet him. The overlook, where they had first made love.
She sucked in a strangled sob. She had never loved anyone in her life as much as she loved Sugar Bear. And he loved her, too. If not for the Jabberwock, they could have continued to see each other. She had fantasies she didn’t tell him about. In her best true heart, she believed that they were soul mates, destined to be together, and the universe would not allow them to remain apart. She would turn eighteen in just twenty-one months. And once she was of age, she could make her own decisions. They could be together then.
But all that had been before the pregnancy test.
Things were different now.
She passed the sign for the Scott’s Ridge Overlook and looked at her watch. He’d told her to meet him here at 6:30 and she was right on time. Taking a trembling breath, she let it out slowly. She had to be strong. He would want her to be strong and she would do that. It would be her gift to him, her strength as she raised their child alone. Just like in the movies.
She was grateful to the Jabberwock that it kept his wife away. Edna had been out of town on J-Day, which left Sugar Bear alone. Well, except for his little boy. If she could have gotten the procedure done, everything would have worked out. With his wife gone, they could meet whenever they wanted, be together as much as they wanted. But now … when her father found out she was pregnant, she would never be with Sugar Bear again. Well, not never, but not for years.
Maybe that’s what they would talk about today.
A little bloom of hope grew in her chest.
That’s why he’d picked here, why he’d wanted to see her here, in their special place! He was going to pledge his love for her, tell her he would wait for her. That it was only twenty-one months, and he’d be there on the other side �
� oh, that really was like a movie! No one would know of their love but the two of them, their passionate secret, and when she turned eighteen, she would announce to her family that she was leaving and she and Sugar Bear and their precious love child would be together forever. And his little boy, too, of course. Toby.
Sugar Bear might not remember it, but the first time they’d met, it had been because of Toby. She had been teaching one of the classes in the church’s Vacation Bible School. She’d been a child herself then, only thirteen, and it was before she had started putting on all the weight. Sugar Bear had come to pick up Toby, who was a strange little boy, frightened of his own shadow.
A niggling little memory surfaced before she could bat it back down. She’d been teaching a lesson on prayer and asked the children to describe what they prayed about. Toby hadn’t wanted to join in, but she had prodded him until he blurted out, “God doesn’t answer prayers. I begged him to make Daddy stop hurting Mommy but he didn’t help.”
Of course, that was before she knew Sugar Bear. You only had to look into his eyes to know he would never harm anybody.
She saw the overlook sign up ahead and she felt a little shiver down her spine. She would never have dreamed when she came here just a few months ago, how a chance encounter here would change her life forever.