by Ninie Hammon
Liam’s eyes were no longer pleading, beseeching. They stared out sightlessly, the pupils fixed.
Sam let out a little cry, couldn’t help it, and the scream was echoed all around the room, handed from one woman to the next, though most didn’t know what it was they were screaming at.
“Liam!” she cried, her husky voice suddenly tear-clotted. But there was no response. She put her fingers to his neck, feeling for the pulse, the rhythmic thumping of the carotid artery, echoing the rhythm of his beating heart. But Liam Montgomery gave off no pulse to echo. It was still.
Sam looked up at Viola, who stood with her cheek to the stock of her rifle, ready to fire, and spoke into the startled silence.
“He’s dead,” Sam said, then sloughed off her professional detachment like dropping a shawl off her shoulders. She leaned over his body, put her arms around him and began to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sugar Bear was seated on the picnic table, with his feet on the concrete bench beside it, looking just like he did the first time she saw him here. The image took her breath way and she couldn’t stifle a sob. He turned and looked at her then, didn’t say anything, just got to his feet and held out his arms and she rushed into them.
She cried there for a long time, just as she had done the first time she met him here. But he didn’t touch her, slide his hand tantalizingly up her back to unhook her bra strap. Her breasts were large, D cups, heavy and pendulous, and when he had fondled them, she understood for the first time what it meant to be aroused. She’d been panting then, gasping for air, and when he’d leaned over and kissed her there, each one, she would have collapsed from desire if she hadn’t been leaning against the table.
Now, he only held her while she cried, patting her back tenderly. She wanted his tenderness, of course, but she needed his passion. She needed to know he still wanted her, still loved her. She needed to feel his presence inside her.
But she did have his presence inside her. Carried his baby under her heart. And that’s what they had met to talk about. What that meant for both their futures.
She struggled to control her sobbing, knew that her tears had totally destroyed her makeup, that her mascara was running in twin black lines down her cheeks and if she wiped it, it would smear and she’d look like a Halloween mask. she shouldn’t have cried, didn’t want him to see her like this, their last time.
Last time.
The words threatened to send her into another round of near-hysterical bawling, but she grabbed hold of her emotions. She needed to be strong now. He would want her to be strong. And she had to show him, demonstrate to him that she could be strong … could remain silent and stoic while he waited for her.
Somehow he had guided her to one of the benches attached to the table, facing out, looking out at the view from the Top of the World, only a few feet from the post that held the dangling remains of the restraining fence.
He sat beside her and she pulled out of his arms, wishing for all the world that she’d thought to bring tissues. Why hadn’t she thought about that; she had known she was going to cry. But she hadn’t and could do nothing better than to lift the hem of her Eastern Kentucky University tee-shirt and use it to wipe the black off her face.
She was surprised that he didn’t reach out and touch her as she wiped her face, raising the shirt up over her breasts in a tantalizing display.
Then she took a shaky breath and just looked at him, looked into his face, looking for the love that softened his features when he looked at her. He was not a physically attractive man at all. Narrow shoulders, a sunken white chest and a paunch that sometimes got in the way of their lovemaking — his belly and her belly together. Unless she just lay on her back with her knees drawn up … the fit was not ideal.
He walked funny. Actually, she had noticed that the first time she met him, the day he came to pick up Toby from Vacation Bible School. He had a bad knee that sometimes just folded up under him and he had developed a hitching sort of gait to compensate, not a limp exactly. A limp would not have looked odd and his — lurching — did.
His forehead was too high, and now that his hairline had receded off it, it seemed to loom over the top of his face like a cliff. His black eyebrows grew in a single bristly line across the bridge of his nose and he never trimmed them, so they always looked unruly and unkempt. His nose was too big for his face by half, the most dominant feature above his thin lips and small chin, and the nostrils flared out when he breathed, making it look even bigger. It was also so covered with blackheads, some of them huge, that it looked like he’d spilled pepper on it.
Why was she just noticing that now? Surely she had seen them before. Several of them actually had little black stickery things poking out. If you rubbed your hand across the skin you could have felt them. The urge to reach out and squeeze them was almost overpowering. His eyes were small and dark, like little marbles with no discernible color — just dark brown that blended in with the iris so you couldn’t even see the black spot in the center.
There was an unreadable look in those eyes right now that was — not alarming, but … it was just not what she expected to see there.
“Sam said no, didn’t she?” he asked, his voice oddly devoid of any emotion.
“She said she wasn’t trained to do a … procedure like that. But she said that even if she had been, she’d have refused.” She drew in a shaky breath. “She said … it wasn’t just, you know, a clump of cells. That it was a baby, and she wouldn’t kill it.”
He had visibly winced when she said the word ‘baby.” But maybe he just hadn’t realized that she was far enough along — that it really was a baby now.
“She was right. It is …” She hadn’t admitted this even to herself, heard the truth of it in her voice as she said the word. “I’ve felt it move.” She had resolutely ignored the little fluttery feelings, told herself it was just her gurgling gut, her faulty digestive organs that had doomed her to life in a body encased in rolls of fat. Now, she placed her hand almost protectively over her belly.
“Did you tell Sam about me?”
“Sure, I told—”
“Did you tell her my name?”
He barked the words and she flinched at his brusqueness.
“No, I called you ‘Sugar Bear,’ like we agreed.”
“Who else knows?”
“Nobody.”
“You didn’t tell a girlfriend, confide in one of the people in your church?”
“Of course not. You know I don’t have any real friends. I don’t have anybody … only you.”
She hadn’t meant for that last part to sound so plaintive, so pleading. And when he didn’t respond with reassurance — that she did have him, that he would love her and — she suddenly felt the bottom drop out of her belly.
Could it be … could it possibly be that he was … going to leave her? The very thought of it made her so nauseous bile rose up in the back of her throat. It was one thing for their love to be ripped apart by circumstances, two lovers who couldn’t be together. That happened in the movies and in stories all the time. It was a horrible thought — not to see him or touch him. But it didn’t feel alone. Abandoned. That was the most awful feeling in the world.
“Howie …”
“I told you not to call me that. Not to ever call me that. You might slip and—”
He must have seen how devastated she felt, read it on her face, because he softened.
“But it’s alright. It doesn’t matter now. Everything’s going to be fine.”
She should have felt encouraged by those words. But she didn’t. She felt … frightened.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As soon as the mood of the crowd turned ugly, Charlie carried Merrie out of the room in her arms. She stopped just outside the center set of doors, ready to rush the child to safety outside at the first hint that the chaos in the room was about to spill out of it into the hallway.
She had seen it all, watched in fascinated horror
as the docile crowd had been whipped into a frenzy and then goaded into violence. That’s what it had looked like to her. The whole encounter hadn’t taken five minutes, and the level of hostility had increased in that time from zero to sixty. It had turned mean and ugly almost between one heartbeat and another, and the hostility was not confined to one place in the crowd with a couple of antagonists squaring off at each other. It was everywhere, like a grassfire that’d been lit in several places at the same time.
The tension in the room now felt like a thunderstorm building up to that first blinding flash of lightening.
Liam jumped off the stage and waded into the crowd, shouting, but his voice was drowned out by—
A gunshot! Abrupt silence.
From where she stood, Charlie couldn’t tell if anybody had been shot or if somebody had just fired a shot into the ceiling. But the crowd pulled back from a space in the front left of the crowd like a wave receding off the beach and she saw Sam, the top of her head and her red hair, shove her way through the crowd to that spot and then drop out of sight.
Somebody had been shot.
“Who shot Liam?” somebody cried.
Liam? No!
An instantaneous argument broke out, accusations, shouting; the wave that had receded away from the body on the floor instantly flowed back into the space and the opening vanished.
“It was them! The good-for-nothing Haywoods.”
“Don’t you dare accuse—”
Charlie was frozen in shock and horror when another shot rang out, then two more in rapid succession. She turned in the direction of the sounds and saw Viola Tackett and three men — her boys — standing on the stage with weapons trained on the crowd.
Viola had been at the back of the room. Charlie had seen her come out of the little door beside the stage and make her way to the back wall. She hadn’t been carrying a rifle then, Charlie was sure of it. But she had one now, trained on the crowd.
In the stunned silence that followed the gunshots, Viola ordered the crowd to put their weapons on the floor, and Sam saw men and women lean over to obey the command. Then she told the crowd to get back so Sam could tend to Liam and directed her boys to collect the firearms. Obie and Zach leapt off the stage to comply. Neb stood stalwartly beside his mother.
Liam!
Seconds ticked by. Only a handful of seconds. Charlie recognized the voice that squeaked out a small scream. It was Sam. Charlie’s voice joined the voices of other women in the crowd. Charlie took a couple of steps to go to Sam and Liam before it registered with her that she had Merrie in her arms, whose eyes where huge and frightened.
“Gimme the little ‘un,” said a voice beside her and she turned to see Mrs. Throckmorton, the woman whose cat had been a patient of E.J.’s on Jabberwock Day. The woman had hovered over her cat and had made friends with Merrie when the child took over the veterinary hospital and turned it into her own personal petting zoo.
“You ‘member me, doncha, sweetheart?”
“Mittens!” Merrie said.
Mrs. Throckmorton held out her arms to the child.
“Whadda ya say you and me go outside and I’ll show you how to put a June bug on a piece of string and fly it around your head like a model airplane.”
Merrie leaned toward the dumpy little woman, her arms extended.
“June bugs go bzzzzz.” Merrie made a reasonable facsimile of the cry of a June bug.
“You sound just like one!” She took Merrie out of Charlie’s arms and nodded with her chin toward the space on the floor where Liam Montgomery’s body lay. “You come get her outside when your … bidness here is done.”
Charlie tried to say thank you, but discovered her throat was too clogged to speak. The woman nodded and waddled toward the outside door with Merry babbling cheerfully in her arms.
She didn’t remember crossing the room to Liam and Sam, shoving her way through the crowd, mercilessly elbowing anybody who denied her passage.
Bursting out of the crowd, she found Sam on her knees beside Liam, bent over him, holding him. Crying.
She knelt beside Sam, reached out and took Liam’s lifeless hand and put her arm around Sam’s shoulders.
Viola Tackett was talking now, but Charlie didn’t pay any attention to her, shocked, staggered by the sudden violent death of her friend. Later she would remember how Viola had said she would find out who it was that’d shot Liam Montgomery and “see they got theirs,” whatever that meant. Then she said she and her boys were going to stand in the gap for the fallen officer, would keep the peace, “land with both feet” on anybody who done something against their neighbors.
“You got a dispute with your neighbor, you come see me,” she said. “I’ll judge fair, settle things without nobody getting up in somebody else’s face. But if’n you decide to settle your own arguments, you’re gonna get a little visit from one of my boys.”
Her boys. Malachi. Charlie looked around stupidly into the crowd, like he would miraculously appear there. He had agreed to meet her and Sam here at the meeting. The three of them had mapped out what Malachi was going to say, knew people would listen to him even if they didn’t like what he was saying. He was, after all, one of Viola Tackett’s boys.
But Malachi hadn’t shown up. She couldn’t imagine what could be important enough to keep him away, because somebody had to tell the crowd the information he’d intended to impart.
Somebody.
Charlie got to her feet and called out, “I have something to say.” She interrupted Viola right in the middle of her little speech. That did not sit well with Viola, who turned to look at her like she was a little kid who had just wet her pants in church.
“And what might that be, missy …?”
Charlie turned her back on Viola Tackett to address the rest of the crowd.
“I’m Charlie McClintock. Charlene Ryan McClintock.”
And after those two words of wisdom, Charlie couldn’t think of any way in the world to say the rest of what needed to be said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hayley would have reached out her hand and touched Sugar Bear’s face — she’d done it often, a tender touch that spoke a love she couldn’t put into words. But she wasn’t certain anymore that he would welcome the touch. And besides, she didn’t want to touch his face. His nose. How could she possibly have looked at him for months and never noticed, oh by the way, that you could scrape blackheads off his nose with your fingernail. Yuk! She only barely kept herself from shuddering.
She leaned back away from him, aware that her body language was not open and engaging but she couldn’t help it.
“What are we going to do?” She kept almost all the emotion out of the question.
“Do?”
“About the baby?”
“Apparently there isn’t anything we can do now — about the baby, anyway.”
That was an odd thing to say.
Hayley’s emotions were suddenly so tangled up, she had no idea what she felt anymore. She had come here hoping/believing he was going to pledge to her his undying love, tell her he would wait for her, no matter how long it took.
It seemed clear now, he wasn’t going to say that.
And she felt … what?
Right now she was … glad.
How could she be glad? She couldn’t explain it, but something profound had shifted, and she didn’t really want him to say he’d wait for her, that they’d be together forever. She didn’t want to be with him forever.
It was a thought she had not entertained even momentarily since the day she’d felt the cold concrete on her back on this picnic table, caught up in the heat of passion.
The thought of a future with Howard Witherspoon suddenly didn’t sound appealing at all. And there was a certain relief in the realization that there wasn’t likely to be one.
But she was going to have his baby.
“I’m keeping it, the baby.” She tried to read his expression, but there was a wall up and his face was no longer
“the mirror of his soul.” It had become the bank vault door that kept everybody out. “I’m going to tell my parents tonight. They’re going to go postal.” And they would. But it was a caring postal, and it would pass eventually and they would be there for her and for the baby.
His lack of response prodded her to add, “Oh, I’m not going to tell them about you. They’ll ask who the father is — duh — but I’ll refuse to answer. I won’t drag you into it.”
“No. You won’t drag me into it.”
He stood and reached out his arms to her.
And she didn’t want his embrace. She just wanted to leave.
She stood, too.
“I have to go now.”
And he said again, in that same parroting tone, “Yes, you have to go now.”
It wasn’t until Howie Witherspoon took hold of her wrist instead of her hand that Hayley Norman felt fear.
She tried to pull her arm free and he held on, and then her fear ballooned inside her until it filled her whole soul.
No longer the raging emotional terror that he would leave her, that she would be alone again. Now she was afraid he …
She glanced to the left, to the cliff face.
So did he.
A little peep of a scream escaped her.
And he actually smiled.
“No!” The word exploded out of her throat on a breath of terror.
He held firm to her wrist and took a step toward the ledge only a few feet away.
From that moment on, Hayley Norman operated on pure instinct. Survival instinct. She didn’t plot out a defense strategy or escape plan, she just lashed out. She reached out with her free hand and clawed his face, her perfectly manicured nails ripping four gouges down his cheek. He yelped in pain and she drew back her Army-boot-clad foot and kicked him in the shin as hard as she could, the leg with the bad knee, and it folded up. He went down to his knees but still held onto her wrist, wouldn’t let go, so she kicked out again, blindly, just to get him to loosen his grip, not a targeted blow. But it caught him right in the face, a savage blow from an army boot. She could feel and hear teeth breaking and he released his hold on her arm and howled out a strangled, garbled cry of pain.