by Hank Early
IN THE VALLEY OF THE DEVIL
AN EARL MARCUS MYSTERY
Hank Early
This one’s for Luke.
Acknowledgments
Writing this novel was unlike writing any novel I’ve ever attempted. The threat of a looming deadline made this novel uniquely challenging. There were many times I felt as if this book was doomed and would never be satisfactorily finished. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been without a few key people who all contributed to getting me to the finish line.
First up is Faith Black Ross who remains the consummate “writer’s” editor because of her light, yet deft touch and a deep reservoir of patience, without which, she might have given up on me and this book. The first draft I turned into her was deeply flawed, but her calmness steadied me and her grace allowed me the time and space to make it right.
Jenny Chen may be the most efficient and competent person I’ve worked with in publishing. She is a marvel of goodwill, enthusiasm, and support. I can’t imagine making it through this book without her.
Sarah Poppe is a fine publicist, always willing to go the extra mile to promote my books, and I shudder to think where either Earl Marcus book would be without her.
My agent, Alec Shane, is the very best agent I could have hoped for when I found myself looking way back in 2013. He’s measured and smart, and works his ass off for me and my books. He’s also teaching me patience (whether he knows it or not!), and that’s a lesson I sorely need. I can’t say enough how great it feels to be in the hands of an agent I trust.
I can’t imagine writing anything without the advice, counsel, and critiques of my friend Kurt Dinan. Kurt is a young adult author who is the rarest kind of writer I know: insanely gifted in both writing and editing. He’s probably helped me more than anyone else to become a better storyteller, and most of it boils down to one admonition I hear over and over again when he reads my work: “I need something to happen soon.” I think of his words whenever I am writing, and I always try to write stories where he can’t possibly use that critique (he still does, of course).
Last, I want to acknowledge my wife, Becky. I dedicated the first Earl Marcus novel to my daughter and this one to my son, but in a way all of my books could rightly be dedicated to Becky. Her faith in me as a person and a writer has sustained me when I would have otherwise given up. This book is as much hers as it is mine.
1
My mother insisted that when evil left one body, it always jumped into the next. I guessed she based this on scripture—the one about Jesus casting out the demons from a man and into a group of swine. There was a certain amount of logic to this that pleased me when I thought about it, and the older I became, the more I found myself reflecting on the things both my parents had taught me when I was younger. I liked to dissect their platitudes, looking for some pearl of truth, something that might make me feel better about the way in which they had conducted their lives.
It was hard, but sometimes, at least with my mother, I found myself latching onto something that almost made sense.
Like the idea of evil.
If it was a real thing, like so many people believed, why couldn’t it go from one person to the next? Why couldn’t the evil that had resided in my father—his life was perhaps the best argument for evil I could think of—leap into someone else when he died?
I remember once overhearing Mama and Daddy arguing about some church members, the Edisons. Herbert Edison had died a few days before this argument after a long struggle with cancer, something my father attributed to evil. Cancer, to my father, was always the physical manifestation of evil in the body. When his wife, Catherine, had been caught in Filo Jenkins’s barn a week later, with her dress around her head and Filo’s face between her legs, Daddy claimed it was the evil in her that had infected Herbert and caused him to die. This too, was characteristic of my father. If a woman was anywhere near a tragedy or failure of any type, it was her fault.
Mama—though, she’d never say it to Daddy—saw it differently. Herbert—like many of the men who modeled their lives on my father’s sermons—saw his wife the way some men see their dogs: subservient companions who should serve their masters. When Catherine had refused to serve, he hit her so hard, she didn’t come out of her house for months, and when she finally did, the evidence of her misaligned jaw was still plain enough for anyone to see.
So, for Mama, the evil jumped from Herbert, when he’d died, to Catherine, who’d been dutifully sitting by his bedside.
As a kid, the biases of their viewpoints had been lost on me. As an adult, I saw the bias and found myself sympathizing with Catherine and wondering if perhaps Herbert’s evil hadn’t jumped instead to their son—one of the cruelest kids I’d ever known. We called him Choirboy because of his vigilant compliance to my father’s fundamentalist principals. Later, when he was grown, the nickname became a part of him, something that seemed to shape him somehow, and he became the walking embodiment of everything that was wrong with my father’s church.
He was dead now too.
All that evil. Looking for someplace to go.
Why couldn’t it just float off, be carried away on some strange breeze? Why did it always have to come back?
Coulee County and these mountains deserved a respite.
But places—much like people—rarely get what they deserve.
* * *
It would have been easy to say that evil came back on the day I waited with three friends in the late September heat for a man named Jeb Walsh—but probably too simplistic.
Because the truth of it was, Jeb wouldn’t have ever shown up if the evil hadn’t already been here. The more I thought about it, the more I was willing to make the argument Walsh had come here explicitly because of the evil that was waiting for him.
We stood in front of the library steps in downtown Riley, watching as he pulled his white F-150 pickup into the nearest parking space and killed the engine.
The man who stepped out of the truck was nothing like I’d expected. I’d seen the minister and “life coach’s” photo on the back cover of the book I’d forced myself to read through clenched teeth, but in person Jeb Walsh seemed younger and more confident than he had in the black and white photo.
He wore pressed tan pants and a light green golf shirt, tucked neatly into his narrow waistband. In Walsh’s book, he wrote about working out, cleaning up his diet, and how those changes had saved his life. Nothing wrong with that, except his words were laced with a barely hidden disdain for all who didn’t submit to his rigorous ideals of health and what he called “the happy life.”
Another man walked a few feet behind Walsh. He was a ragged, unkempt man with thick muttonchops and feathered hair. I assumed he was Walsh’s bodyguard. No surprise. Men like Walsh always needed bodyguards. This one looked like a redneck who’d seen too many Scorsese movies. His pants were the bottom half of a crimson track suit, and his faded blue shirt looked like he’d found it in the irregular size section of a soon-to-be-closed Kmart. It was nearly as wide as it was long, swallowing him up and somehow still showing a patch of his hairy belly. I might have dismissed him as a clown if not for his imposing size and the swift, no-nonsense way his eyes glanced furtively here and there, lingering just long enough to let you know he was dangerous.
I stood with my best friend, Rufus Gribble, and one of the library directors, a pretty widow named Susan Monroe, watching the two men make their way down the sidewalk. My girlfriend, Mary Hawkins, was part of our group too, but just moments ago had stepped inside the library to use the restroom.
“They’re here,” I said to Rufus, who was blind but so capable some people didn’t even notice it at first. He stood beside me, nodding slowly, his face p
ointed toward the two men, his lips snarled in what I knew to be righteous anger.
Rufus had been the one to alert me to Jeb Walsh. He’d also invited nearly thirty people to gather on the library steps to make sure Walsh knew he wasn’t welcome, that Coulee County would not tolerate his brand of hatred.
Unfortunately, the opposite appeared to be true. Only four of us had taken it seriously enough to show up. I realized now, we’d all been foolish to expect anything else. It wasn’t that there weren’t good people here. There were, but so many of them spent all of their time and energy just trying to keep their heads above water, hustling for their next paycheck, their next moment free from the anxieties of this world.
Still, there was a lot for a man like Jeb Walsh to like about this area. Progress and open-mindedness were still regarded with suspicion in Coulee County. The power structure in the county and the city of Riley was pretty much the definition of the “good old boy network,” something I had no doubt Walsh relished. Perhaps most importantly, the area was overwhelmingly white and Christian; the only exceptions, a handful of poor African Americans who lived in a narrow valley people called Corn Valley. There was Mary, of course—whose father had been black—but despite our relationship, she’d had sense enough to get the hell out and now lived in Atlanta, where she worked as a homicide detective with the Atlanta PD.
The homogeneity of this area was one of the reasons I’d left nearly thirty-two years ago, and one of the main reasons it had taken me so long to come back. And yet, I’d not only come back, I’d chosen to stay. Chalk that up to the influence of Mary Hawkins and the power of finding a kindred spirit in Rufus.
Walsh was originally from south Georgia and had made a name for himself via some outrageous sermons he’d posted on YouTube several years back. He used the notoriety to get a book deal and wrote two or three screeds in the early two thousands about the dangers of immigration. A couple of cable news interviews later, and the Southern Poverty Law Center had put Walsh on a list with other extremists who preached hate and intolerance. Walsh dropped out of the spotlight a bit and reemerged last year with a new book, directed at kids, called Live the Happy Life. While it was, on the surface, a kinder and gentler book compared to his others, some critics had rightly called it out for being even more dangerous because it targeted children, presenting a false correlation between following the moral dictates in the book and being happy.
Then he’d quietly moved to Coulee County, into Sommerville Chase, one of the newest and most exclusive areas in the entire state. In May, the Coulee County school board voted to allow Live the Happy Life to be included in the school curriculum. Only a few people noticed. Rufus was one of them. Since that time, he’d been keeping tabs on Walsh. To be fair, though, nearly everyone was keeping tabs on Walsh these days. A few weeks earlier, he’d announced he’d be making a bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. The damnedest part of it all was that he was already considered to be the favorite would almost definitely emerge the victorious, catapulting him to a position of power that would allow him to hurt more than just Coulee County.
But it was Coulee County that I was worried about now, and like Rufus, I was determined to let Walsh know that life in these mountains wasn’t going to be as easy for him as he thought.
As I watched him stroll down the sidewalk, I found his manner to be chilling. There was something off about the man, something that didn’t come across on television. But here, in the bright light of unfiltered reality, I saw the stiffening of his jaw, the forced squint of his eyes, and the jerky way in which he moved, nearly robotic, but also somehow simian. Yet, despite it all, he exuded confidence, a man ready for any challenge. In fact, he moved in such a way that seemed to suggest he was quite sure no challenge would be forthcoming at all because who would dare step in his path?
The answer came pretty quickly.
Rufus. Rufus dared step in his path.
I had no doubt that Rufus heard him coming and did it on purpose. Two things happened—neither of which I’d been expecting. First—and almost comically—Walsh collided with Rufus. Rufus braced himself against Walsh and managed to shoulder the bigger man to the ground while keeping his balance. Walsh went down hard.
The second thing was the bodyguard’s reaction. He strode swiftly to Rufus, fist raised, but Rufus didn’t see him and stood there with the peace and calm that only a blind man could muster.
“He’s blind,” I said.
The man lowered his hand slightly. People were never sure how much to hold Rufus responsible for when they realized he couldn’t see. The bodyguard’s eyes narrowed, looking closely at Rufus’s face as if trying to prove my statement wrong. He shook his head and stepped back and looked at me. “Maybe you’re the one I should punch then?”
I shrugged. “Why do you need to punch anybody? It was an accident, okay?”
Before the bodyguard could reply, Walsh spoke. He was still on the ground but managed to convey a genial sense of control even from there.
“I hope,” he said, pulling himself up and dusting off his pants, “you didn’t drive too far. I haven’t performed a healing in years. God has shifted my focus away from individual healing to healing the ills of society. I’ll pray with you, of course.”
He glanced around, confused by our silence, and there was a tantalizing flicker in his countenance that seemed to suggest he wasn’t sure he’d read the situation correctly.
Then his eyes fell on Susan.
Susan’s a good-looking woman. Men notice her. That he noticed her was normal. Most straight men took a second glance, or at least let their gaze linger. Hell, I’m not ashamed to admit, I’d caught myself staring a bit too long once or twice, but what he was doing now was completely different. Over the years I’d had the misfortune of looking into the eyes of some truly depraved men and had found the experience chilling to say the least, but this was something I’d rarely witnessed: this was a predator looking at his next meal. He was violating her, and Susan noticed it immediately; we all noticed it. She stepped away, acting on instinct.
I opened my mouth to say something, to come to her defense, but Walsh caught me off guard by reaching for my hand. “Jeb Walsh,” he said, pumping hard.
I pulled my hand away and said the only words I could manage, “We don’t want you here.”
Walsh’s smile grew slowly, the sun taking its time cresting the eastern horizon, until the day seemed filled with it.
“Let me see if I understand. You—you three—came to tell me that? You actually found out when I would be by to meet with the library director about my book signing? I’ve got to admire that kind of dedication, however misplaced. Truly impressive.”
Rufus moved closer now, honing in on Walsh’s voice.
“You want to control this guy?” Walsh said, looking at me.
“He’s got a mind of his own,” I said.
Walsh turned to face Rufus. He opened his mouth to say something, but it was too late.
“You’re a pestilence,” Rufus said, and the thing about Rufus was that when he said you were a pestilence, you couldn’t help but sort of believe him. His voice was a force of nature, the sound of the King James Bible if it could talk. Ancient, stark. Words that dropped on top of you like heavy stones, and that was just his voice. Rufus’s appearance could stop traffic. He was a character pulled from a dark tale, gaunt and rawboned, with a mythic quality that he was all too aware of. He favored dark overalls and tattered, loose-fitting sports coats that hung off his stooped frame. His blind eyes somehow seemed alert and distant at once. Combine all that with his uncanny knack of always knowing just where he was in the world, and—most disturbingly—just where you were in the world, and it added up to the kind of a man you most definitely didn’t want calling you a pestilence.
Walsh moved back a step, clearly not interested in getting tangled up with Rufus again, and tried a different approach.
“It appears you folks take some issue with one of my books? Am I co
rrect?”
“I take issue with all of your books,” Rufus said.
“Well, I have a very simple solution. Don’t buy them.”
I shook my head. “That’s not enough anymore. Now that you’ve gone after kids, a line has been crossed.”
I stepped forward, fists clenched. Was I going to hit him? I didn’t know. That had always been both my strength and weakness. Too many times, the deed was done before I had time to think through the consequences. Too many times, I found myself standing over a bleeding man, wondering if I’d acted too fast, if he’d really deserved the pain I’d put on him. And too many times, the reverse: me looking up at a grinning man, hating my foolish instincts and promising to never make that mistake again.
But sooner or later, it always happened, and always without warning.
“Take it easy,” Walsh’s bodyguard said. His drawl was thick, but not mountain—closer to the Gulf than the Appalachians.
Walsh chuckled again, but I could tell his interaction with Rufus had left him a little shaken, because this time the chuckle seemed forced. “This has really been entertaining, but we do have an appointment. I will pray for all three of you.”
“Four,” Mary said as she exited the library. I stepped back. Mary always had a calming effect on me. She made me remember what I was fighting for—not just a decent life for me, but for her too. For us.
Jeb took one look at her and nodded. “You’re with these people?” What was unstated but implied by his question was his disapproval of whites and blacks being part of the same group.
“I am.”
“I suppose you think I’m a racist or something?”
She shrugged. “Well, I did read your book, and honestly, it’s pretty much there in black and white.”
His bodyguard stepped up and put a hand on Walsh’s shoulder, as if to calm him. Walsh glared at Mary. His gaze was different now, but no less disturbing than when he’d looked at Susan. Except now he was the predator looking at prey that would fight back tooth and nail.