by Hank Early
We walked for another ten or fifteen minutes on the trail, before the trees fell away and I saw the farmhouse, dark and huge against the starry sky. A smaller garden to the right of the house rippled in the breeze, and beyond them both, a silent highway made a snaking scar across the landscape. Far away, I saw headlights moving along the road. I looked around. To the right were the Fingers, where I lived. To my left, I saw the lights of what had to be Sommerville Chase, high atop Summer Mountain.
“Is anybody home?” I said.
“I ain’t sure,” Ronnie said.
“I swear, if he’s not here, if Mary’s not here, I’m going to…” I trailed off. The fact was, I wasn’t going to do anything except fall into despair. My anger was already fading away. Ronnie was stupid, sure, but I honestly believed this hadn’t been malicious.
“Let’s go knock on the door,” he said.
We stood on the covered porch and rang the bell. I couldn’t help but remember how, a few days ago, Lane had thrown Wanda and her kids’ belongings into the yard.
“Look,” Ronnie said.
“What?”
He nodded at the hardwood floor of the porch. A cigarette butt lay near the welcome mat. “That’s Johnny’s. He’s been here.”
“Ring it again,” I said.
Ronnie rang the bell, and I banged hard on it with my fist.
We waited. No one came.
I tried the door handle, but it was locked.
“Where else would he take her? Was there a plan B if this guy isn’t home?”
Ronnie shrugged. “Maybe out to the road?”
I looked around. The road was empty. Somewhere, far away, a car downshifted, and it sounded like a lonely groan at the end of the world.
“I’m calling the sheriff,” I said.
“Hold your horses, now, Earl. That ain’t necessary. You know I got priors.”
“Fuck your priors.” I turned on my phone and dialed the number. It rang once before my phone died. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?”
“It died. Let me use yours.”
“Left it in my truck. It don’t get no service out here. Where you going?”
I’d stepped off the porch and was looking around the yard. “I need a brick or a stick or something.”
“Why?”
“Going to break a window and get to a phone.”
“Shit, Earl. I need this job.”
I ignored him and ranged out across the backyard, looking for something I could use. When I didn’t find anything, I walked back toward the woods we’d come from, with the intention of breaking a branch off, but something stopped me.
There on the ground, still hot, was another cigarette butt.
I waved Ronnie off the porch. “Another cigarette.”
He came over and stood beside me. “That’s his,” he said. “And look at this. There’s a little trail here. God knows, I wouldn’t have ever seen it.”
I didn’t respond. I was already following the trail, moving sideways through the thick tree limbs before breaking into a run.
12
Ronnie saw him before I did. In fact, in my hurry, I’d already run beyond where he lay beside the little stream, his body sprawled out, one boot in the running water, the other propped up on a moss-covered rock.
“It’s Johnny,” Ronnie said.
I knelt beside him, trying to determine if he was dead. I put the back of my hand under his nose and felt the heat of his breath. “Alive.”
“What should we do?”
“Get a little water from the stream,” I said. “Pour it on his face.”
Ronnie cupped his hands in the stream and leaned over, letting the cold water slip out of his hands. It hit Johnny’s face, and the man stirred slightly. “Again,” I said, reaching for my 9mm.
The second dose of water made him groan and open his eyes. I pressed the gun against the side of his head.
“Oh,” he said. “Who are—Ronnie?”
Ronnie shrugged at him as if to apologize.
“Where is she?” I said, pressing the gun against his temple.
“I…” He looked around, genuinely confused. I felt the panic rising again. This wasn’t good. “Old Nathaniel,” he said.
“What? Who is Old Nathaniel?”
“He took her.”
“Which way?”
He tried to sit up, gasped, and lay his head back on the ground. I saw now that he’d been hit pretty hard. Blood had pooled on the ground around his head. “Help me up?” he said.
Ronnie gave him a hand, helping him to his feet. That was when I saw what had been lying under his leg.
Mary’s gun.
Ronnie reached for it.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Why?”
“Prints.”
He nodded and stepped back. “Cool.”
Johnny—a dumpy man who wore shorts and a windbreaker—steadied himself against a nearby tree.
“I need you to tell me what happened,” I said. The words came out of my mouth, but it didn’t even feel like I was speaking them. My head buzzed with the images from my vision. The black water from the dream, rising to meet me. Mary, struggling in the water below me.
“Earl?”
“Huh?”
Ronnie shook me a little. “You with us?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” I looked around. Johnny was staring at me. “Tell me,” I said.
“I was trying to, but—”
“Start over.”
He nodded. “Me and Eldridge were watching the south end of the cornfield. It’s the spot we like because it ain’t so dense.” He wiped at the back of his head and looked at his bloody hand. “Jesus.”
“You’re fine. Tiny wound.”
He nodded, maybe too concussed to disbelieve me.
“We saw her coming, and, well, Mr. Jefferson said the ones we’re supposed to be looking out for are probably young and black, and she looked young and black, so Eldridge took out his gun and told her to stop. She said she was a cop and she was lost. That she’d gotten confused in the corn. I kind of believed her. I mean, she seemed like she was telling the truth, but I also figured she could be lying, so I told her to give me her gun, and she did. Then I took her to Mr. Jefferson’s house. Eldridge stayed behind.”
“And then what?”
“He wasn’t home. So I called him, and he said he’d meet me over on County 7. Said to bring her through the woods and he’d be there soon. She barely seemed scared at all, so that made me think she really was a cop.”
“What happened then?”
“Then we walked for a while along this trail. It’s the quickest way to 7. Wasn’t long before I started hearing something. She heard it too. We both thought somebody might be following us. At first I figured it was one of the boys playing a prank, but then I wondered why they’d waste their time, you know? I heard the noise again, and I turned around, and I saw something move behind a tree. That was when I panicked.”
“Why?”
“You never heard of Old Nathaniel?”
I searched my memory. The name seemed distantly familiar. Where had I heard of him, and why did it feel recent? It also felt connected to Mary somehow. “I don’t know, maybe.”
“Old Nathaniel, the Hide-Behind Man? You can only see him out of the corner of your eye. Until it’s too late.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought it was just a legend too. But I saw him. Just like the old story said. At the last minute. Right before he hit me. I saw him.”
“What did he look like?”
Johnny looked afraid now. His face was drawn and his lips twitched. He touched the top of his head again, wiping away blood. “He had a mask on. A … I don’t know … a burlap sack. It was tied around his neck. He hit me with a … shit … I don’t know what it was. It was hard and heavy, like a tire rod or something.”
“And where was Mary when he hit you?”
“She was rig
ht beside me.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
He shook his head.
“Let me have your phone.”
He reached into his pocket and his hand came back empty.
“It’s gone.”
“Shit,” I said. “What about your gun? Where’s that?”
He looked around, feeling his waist. “I had it in my hand.”
“There,” Ronnie said, pointing. It was near the stream.
Johnny started for it.
“Nope,” I said. “Leave it too. Both guns better be in the same place when I come back.”
“Where you going?” Ronnie said.
“To find her. Is this the way to the road?”
“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Keep on the trail.”
That was exactly what I did until I made it to the road five or ten minutes later. Once there, I knelt on the shoulder and caught my breath.
Mary was gone. The knowledge of it opened up something inside of me. It felt like a lightning storm in the pit of my stomach. I rubbed my face and collapsed onto the ground. My fears had come true, and now I felt more afraid, more vulnerable than ever.
13
At the road, I managed to flag down an eighteen-wheeler. The sleepy trucker let me borrow his phone, and I called the sheriff’s office directly.
A deputy said somebody would be out as soon as possible. I gave the trucker his phone back and watched his taillights fade into the darkness.
I sat down on the side of the road to wait.
Trying to think was nearly impossible. The heaviness I felt inside my chest mingled with the hope I kept telling myself I needed to be feeling, and made the night around me seem surreal, like something from a film I was watching. I tried to make myself believe that Mary had simply escaped in the struggle, that she wasn’t too far away at this very moment. It was even possible, I tried to convince myself, that she’d come walking out of those trees at any moment.
One nagging doubt kept me from buying into this particular fantasy.
The gun. Mary’s gun. If she’d been able to escape, wouldn’t she have taken her gun? It was possible she’d taken off before Johnny had dropped the gun, but why hadn’t she come back for it? It was what I would have done, and any survival instinct I had, I felt sure Mary would have too.
And what about Old Nathaniel? On the surface it seemed utterly ridiculous. The Hide-Behind Man? Horseshit. There was something else happening here. It infuriated me that I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard the name Old Nathaniel before.
Then it hit me. The fake skull in the cave. Someone had written “Old Nathaniel” on the wall of the cave. They’d written something else too. “AOC.”
I stood when I saw the police car approaching and waved my hands. It was one of the Tahoe’s, which meant Coulee County Sheriff’s department. A female deputy got out of the vehicle and nodded at me.
“I’m Deputy Clark,” she said. “Did you call?”
“Yeah. My girlfriend is missing.”
“And someone is injured?”
I nodded. “Yes. I can take you there.”
She pulled a two-way radio from her hip. “This is Deputy Clark. I need another unit and a medic.” She looked at me. “You’re the detective. The one from the newspaper.”
“Yeah. And my girlfriend is Mary Hawkins. She’s a homicide detective from Atlanta. She used to work for Coulee County, as a matter of fact.”
This got her moving. “Okay, take me to the injured party. You can tell me on the way.”
* * *
I was worried that one or both of the men would be gone when we arrived, but was pleased to see them sitting on a big rock beside the stream. Both guns were still untouched where they lay.
I’d explained everything to Clark as we’d walked there, and she went over now to interview Johnny.
I covered my face, hating the waiting, the slowness of it all.
“I’m going back to Jefferson’s,” I said.
“I don’t advise that,” Clark said. “You need to wait on the sheriff. He’ll be here soon.”
“You can’t just expect me to wait around and do nothing.”
“Sure I can. Sit tight. I’m sure your friend can take care of herself.”
She was right. Mary could take care of herself, but as much as that thought should have made me feel calmer, it didn’t. Mary could take care of herself, which somehow made her disappearance even more disturbing. Mary wasn’t one to get lost. Even if she had run away, she would have circled back for the gun. Yet it still lay there, untouched. I walked the area, trying to alleviate some of the nervous energy I felt.
An eternity seemed to drag by. Ronnie loaned me his flashlight, and I held mine in the other hand, creating two large swaths of light. I walked back and forth, shining them over the forest floor. Pine needles, leaves, and grass blended together to create a dense cover over the ground. I kicked at it and shone the lights at the exposed ground, growing angrier and less patient by the minute.
Something caught the light. I knelt, moving away some fallen leaves, and saw a small black snakelike wire. I picked it up and realized it was longer and thicker than I’d first imagined. On one end was a tiny microphone, like the one Rufus had showed us the other day. I wound the line up and stuck the mic in my pocket, wondering why or how it had gotten here. Was it a clue or just a random artifact, perhaps blown by a storm far away from where it had originally been lost? And how much should I read into Rufus finding another one just like this near the caves? The same caves where “Old Nathaniel” had been scrawled across the back wall?
I was about to say something to the deputy about it, when her radio crackled. She answered it, and the voice on the other end wanted to know where she was.
“In the woods, near a little stream. Probably feeds into the Blackclaw. There’s a little trail. Follow it. You’ll see us.”
“Can I go?” Ronnie said.
“No,” Deputy Clark said. “You can’t.”
“Shit. I need a smoke, and Earl made me lose my last one.”
“Me too,” Johnny said.
“You need a medic. But never mind that. Nobody leaves until the sheriff talks to you.”
I opened my mouth to tell the deputy about the mic I’d found, but at the last minute decided not to. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I was already fearing being shut out of things. Maybe I still had a bad taste in my mouth from the last sheriff, a good friend of my father’s and just as corrupt. Either way, I decided to just hold it. It probably wouldn’t ever amount to anything anyway. But it made me feel like I was making some progress nonetheless.
A few minutes later, Patterson showed up with a holder filled with four cups of coffee. He handed one to Clark first and then passed out the rest to Ronnie, Johnny, and me. When Patterson handed the coffee to Ronnie, I couldn’t help but notice a barely concealed disdain on his face. Apparently, the two men had already been introduced.
“Thank you,” I said, and drank quietly until, gradually, the world seemed to come back into focus.
“I’ve already spoken to Lane Jefferson. Called him on the way over. His story checks out. He was visiting a friend. Says he took a call about a woman from one of his men guarding the cornfield. He told him to take her to the road and he’d come by. He said he never saw them, and when he tried to call back, he couldn’t get his guy on the phone.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Back at his house, I suppose. Can you tell me exactly how you and Detective Hawkins ended up in the cornfield tonight?”
I glanced at Ronnie. “He set us up.”
“Explain,” Patterson said, eyeing Ronnie suspiciously.
“Shit, Earl. It wasn’t like that,” Ronnie said.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Patterson said.
I told him everything, starting with my first run-in with Jefferson a day or two earlier. When I got to the part about Mary and I arriving and not finding Ronnie, Patterson interrupted me
.
“I think I get the picture.”
“I want to talk to Jefferson,” I said. “He’s the one behind this.”
“Nope,” Patterson said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with issues between these two men. Ronnie here hates Lane Jefferson because his sister decided to date him. It’s as simple as that. In my mind, he’s done this as some kind of elaborate way to frame Lane Jefferson.”
“Bullshit,” Ronnie said.
“Doesn’t anybody care to hear what really happened?” Johnny said.
“I’ll get to you in a minute,” Patterson said. “I want to hear what Mr. Thrash has to say for himself.”
“I say bullshit on all of it. Lane threatened to hurt my niece. I’ll admit to lying to Earl to get him and his girlfriend out here, but … shit, I didn’t know she was going to go missing.”
Patterson looked at me. “You believe that?”
The crazy thing was that I did. “Yeah.”
Patterson laughed. “I misjudged you. Thought you had basic walking-around sense.”
“Never claimed to be smart, but sometimes a man just knows.”
“That right? Well, fine, let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this,” Patterson said. “I think we can.” He turned to his deputy. “Take Mr. Thrash’s statement. Ronnie, you better get your story straight because I got a feeling it’s going to show up in court one day.”
“Fuck you,” Ronnie said. “Why don’t you go score some more weed for your wife?”
Patterson’s face stayed blank, but even in the dark I could see his jaw twitch reflexively at Ronnie’s words.
He let his gaze linger on Ronnie a little longer before turning to Johnny.
Johnny told it just like he told it to me and Ronnie.
When he finished, Patterson was silent. He turned around, surveying the scene. “Old Nathaniel, huh?”
“That’s right. Wore a mask and all.”
Patterson paced over to the gun again, peering down at it. He looked back at Ronnie.
“I think what we have here are a couple of dumbasses who thought they could pull off a kidnapping of a police officer.”
“I didn’t kidnap nobody,” Ronnie said. “You need to talk to Lane Jefferson. He’s the one who told me to get them out here.”