Only the Hunted Run

by Neely Tucker

  “Didn’t find what you were looking for?” beamed the clerk, coming forward to the counter, way too goddamn cheerful. She looked up at him eagerly. Hangovers and cheerful people. This was an ugly mix, worse than ginger ale in bourbon.

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t,” he said, working up one edge of his mouth in an effort he hoped would come across as wry good humor. “But you were lovely to let me look around so long. Is the tax assessor’s room down the hall there? You think they might have land records?”

  She looked back at him through her goggle-eyed glasses and considered the matter at hand, like her day turned on it.

  “You lookin’ for the same thing, what you told me earlier? People in the south end of the county, twenty, thirty years back?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “They relatives of yours? This a court case?”

  “Neither, ma’am. Actually.”

  She looked at Sully. He looked at her. The clock ticked.

  “I’m a reporter at a newspaper back east,” he finally whispered, so no one else could hear. He hoped this might inspire a sense of confidentiality, adding a conspiratorial glance around the room. “I’m looking for a family that might have known the Waters family. You know, that Waters? Socially, sort of. Last name, I think it started with an H.”

  She sighed, taking her weight from one foot to the other. “Those are country people out there, you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I’m from Tula, Louisiana, ma’am. You don’t got to tell me.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “How many people live in Tula?”

  “No more than have to.”

  A peal of laughter, bouncing through the recycled air. Two of her coworkers turned to look, then went back to their computers.

  “Sounds like here,” she whispered. “Being a reporter, is that a good job?”

  “Beats shoveling cow shit,” he whispered back, “which I have also done for cash money.”

  “Hunh. This right here? Sitting in the same office all day, same people, same music on the radio. Did you notice we don’t even got windows?”

  “It’s not so bad,” Sully said, looking around the dropped-down ceilings, the cubicles somewhere between lifeless and soul killing. “But I bet Tulsa, Oklahoma City? Those would be okay, too. You know, maybe move up there.”

  She shrugged. Her pale shoulders were bare. Sully was surprised they weren’t blue. The AC had to be turning her into an ice cube. “You know the FBI was in here, the courthouse, for days, looking at the Waters’ family everything,” she said. “But it just weren’t nothing.”

  “I guess not.”

  She started to pick the book up and stopped and said, “But you, you ain’t interested in the Waters.”

  “Not really,” Sully said. “I’m trying to find out a family who owned land to the south of them. White folks, maybe.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Like I said, maybe with an H.”

  “You know Quapaw Creek Reservoir? Site 6?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You know where sixty-two is, coming out of Prague?” She pronounced in the local manner, “Pray-gue.”

  “Sure,” he lied, but knowing enough about little towns to fake it. “You just take that right.”

  She nodded, her bangs bouncing. “They call it Main Street, but it’s just sixty-two coming through town. Now, from here? You get yourself back over to Stroud. Get on ninety-nine, go down—this is south—past the res. Go way on. Now you get in Prague, such as it is—and I mean, don’t blink—you go past that Jim Thorpe mural over on your left. You’ll see a gas station, an old gas station, it’s painted sort of pink, it doesn’t work anymore, it’s on your left. But you, you wanna turn right on sixty-two. You with me?”

  “Riding shotgun.” With a nod, to keep her going.

  She flushed, smiled. “Now. You take that right, you go past the bank, the Sonic, you just keep on going. You get out of town—that don’t take but a minute—and you’re gonna pass a church. Now you want to slow on down. On your right, you’re gonna come up on a gravel road. You’ll know it because it makes a quick little S turn right off. You take that one, you hear? You go a mile, maybe two, the reservoir’ll be on your right. It’s real fat for a bit, you know, you can see it, and then it turns into a finger.”

  “Now. North of that, just a little bit, you’ll see a gravel drive to your right. You take that, you go back maybe a quarter mile. You can’t see it from a road. There’s an old house. Nobody’s lived there since God was a baby. But they did back then.”

  She stopped, looking at him, nodding. It took a second before he realized she was finished.

  “And who’s that?” he asked.

  “Who’s what?”

  “The people who lived in the old house.”

  “The Harpers, of course. Isn’t that what we were talking about?”

  Sully felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  “Harpers?”

  “I do. They been gone for years and years. William, that was the husband? He had money in oil or cattle or something in Texas? He wasn’t here that much. They just used that place out there on the reservoir as a weekend sort of place. They’d be out there a lot in the summer. They’re all dead now. Far as I know.”

  “So, okay, so what’s the name of that road they’re on, my turn off sixty-two?”

  “If it’s got a name, I never heard it. On the maps, its county road thirty-four eighty, but nobody ever calls it that. It’s just the road that goes by the reservoir. Hardly nobody lives out that way.”

  “Hunh. I didn’t see any Harpers listed in there, the land records.”

  “I would imagine William had it under the company name he ran. Tex, Texa-something.”

  “Tex-Oil?”

  “That sounds right. Way yonder.” She fluttered a hand out toward the parking lot and beyond, south.

  “Yes, ma’am. That was listed . . . wait.” He flipped the big plat book back open, going through the pages. “Jesus, I just had it.”

  “Language,” she said, frowning.

  “Sorry. I got home trainin’, I just forgot it. Here now. Tex-Oil. That sounds like an impressive company. This property right here, though, it’s small. Couple dozen acres.”

  “It was just a weekend place. It wasn’t his oil operation or nothing.”

  “Hunh. You remember the family?”

  “I wasn’t but a tadpole. All I remember was the story that went around.”

  “The story.”

  “Yep.”

  He waited. “Which one was that?”

  The clerk leaned forward, dropped her whisper even more. “Mrs. Harper, she committed suicide. Slit her throat with a butcher knife one morning, right there in the bathroom just off the kitchen.”

  “Good God.”

  “Everybody talked about it for years.”

  Sully blinked. “Slit her own throat?”

  She nodded, chin bobbing. “I think she really didn’t want to be with us no more.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I don’t know if the house is still out there or not. The family, they left right after the suicide, you know. The scandal and all?”

  He nodded. The lady was gold. “Sure, sure.”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing them again.”

  Sully was looking at the pages open before him, the map, spelling out the plat as clear as day. The Harpers had frontage on the lake. He flipped the book shut.

  “Ma’am, we got started to talking, I didn’t even get your name.”

  “Jo-Ellen.” She looked at his scars, her eyes flicked just that quick, then back at him. She was trying to decide if she should bat her eyelashes, he could tell, wondering if his question had been personal or professional. But no, the issue was decided: too many scars.
She eased back from him ever so slightly. Half an inch.

  “Jo-Ellen,” he said, “thank you for the help. I might miss the driveway the first time, but I’ll find it. If I pull into the wrong one, somebody’ll just run me off with a round of buckshot.”

  “Hon,” she said, “there ain’t no more than three driveways out there to pull up into, and I don’t think any of ’em got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, much less a shotgun.”

  “Okay.”

  “But there’s a crooked tree just before you get there. The lake, the tree, the driveway. When my daddy used to drive by there, he’d tell us that’s where the ghost of the crazy lady lived, that she’d come get us in the dark if we weren’t good.”

  * * *

  The house, by the time he found it, was an abandoned shell baking in the heat.

  Open fields, pasture, the lake to the south. A narrow grove of oaks set along the long, unpaved drive. The prairie grass rustled against the front bumper as he eased ahead. The driveway was more of a memory than an actual thing.

  The house lay in front of him like a ruination from Faulkner. It was a crumbling two-story brick farmhouse, two columns out front, the whole thing falling in on itself. Shutters had long since faded beside the windows and were now just dried out slats of brown wood. Half a dozen windows were broken out.

  As he pulled up to the front, a squirrel squatted on a window ledge upstairs. It ducked back inside when he killed the engine. He got out. Nothing but the wind moved. It was nicer than the Russell Waters place, he guessed, but its sense of decay was heightened by the pretensions to grandeur. It didn’t even look back at him. It just sat there, hulking, stupid, dead.

  “Too bad for you,” he said, to the house, as he was getting out of the car, “I don’t believe in haints.”

  Sweat was already starting to roll down his forehead when he pushed open the front door. The architects had been going for the classic Southern mansion. A center hallway. What would have been the library to the left, the main dining room to the right. Kitchen to the rear right, through a narrow door from the dining room. He stood, listening. Nothing. He pulled his shirt out, untucking it to try to keep the sweat from soaking it, unbuttoning the top button. Trash and leaves in a corner, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. A broken ceramic cup.

  Taking the circular stairway upstairs, he kept to the outside of the steps, avoiding the rotten spots in the middle. The steps, like the flooring, had saddled in, buckling from water damage. The walls, all bare, were ruined with water and seepage and mildew, the paint long since cracked and peeling. Rat pellets were everywhere, mixed with dust and dirt. Bird nestings. He didn’t spot the squirrel, but there was scratching in the attic. Looking out the back window of the master bedroom, he saw the cracked and faded pool in the backyard. It was now a stagnant pond of brown water.

  That’s when he heard the sound of a car approaching from out front.

  He walked to the front room, careful to stay out of the line of sight. A sheriff’s patrol car, white in the middle, black at the hood and trunk, pulled to a stop behind his car. The deputy—or sheriff, hell, he couldn’t see—waited in the air-conditioned car. Sully could make out only his outline, but guessed the man was calling in his plates.

  Not moving, barely breathing, he waited, looking.

  Then the driver’s side door swung open, the cop got out, surveyed the area, and plopped his hat on his head. The man was beefy, leaning toward fat, lumbering stiff-kneed toward the house. He was wearing a flak jacket underneath the uniform. Seriously? There was that much bang-bang in Lincoln County?

  Sully cursed under his breath. Then he went to the window. He called out, “Helllooo, Officer? Hey? l’m just looking around. Here’s my hands.” He held them out. “Just me. Nobody else.”

  The deputy looked up, brought his lumbering to a halt, and put his hands on his hips. He said, not putting much into it, “Don’t suppose you’re the absentee owner.”

  The cop leaned over and spat a black line of tobacco juice. He seemed pained, as if walking from the car had taxed him and now he was pissed about it and going to make somebody grieve for it. “Come on down, then, and tell me the hell you doing. Jo-Ellen said I’d find you out here, like as not.”

  * * *

  The cop was coming up to the porch by the time Sully reached the front door. “Jo-Ellen, she said a reporter fella was interested in the place,” the deputy said, putting a hand on a rotting front porch rail. “That’d be you.”

  “It would,” Sully said. “I didn’t know I was that much an item of concern.”

  “You ain’t. I just saw her there at the Arby’s. Lunchtime. I asked after how her day was. She mentioned you. I drove out.”

  “Sully Carter, Officer, good meeting you.” He stepped over a rotting board on the porch to shake the man’s hand, look him in the eye. This was a deputy, not the sheriff, but he walked up onto the porch, into the shade, like he owned the house himself.

  “You mind my asking your interest in the old Harper place here?” he said. “Not to be particular, but you are trespassing. If we were to get technical about it.”

  “Do we want to get technical?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what we’re doing and we’ll see.”

  Sully nodded. “I’n leave, no problem. I’s just looking around, nothing in particular.” He waved his arms around, demonstrating a lack of focus, a lack of knowledge. “I’m a reporter, like Jo-Ellen told you. You know, that Waters business? Casting a wide net. Imagine you guys been flooded with feds.”

  He fished a card out of his wallet. The deputy barely looked at it, tucked it into his shirt pocket and ignored the opportunity to piss and moan about federal law enforcement.

  “Casting a wide net for what?’

  “A story. A feature. The Wicker Man. Anything. Jo-Ellen, she said the Harpers, they had an incident back in the day. There ain’t nothing else going on, so I came out here. You always want to show the home office movement, that you’re doing something. This is just local color.”

  “We’re kinda local-colored out at the moment,” the deputy said. “Reporters from Japan to Germany, all of last week.”

  “I bet.”

  “Who’s the Wicker Man?”

  “Nobody,” Sully said. “Well. An old horror movie. Locals in this little town had a weird cult, built a big wicker model of a man, put this guy inside it and burned him alive. Orgies and naked chicks. It’s sort of the idea that strange things are happening in little places that look normal. If that makes any sense.”

  The deputy did not appear that amused. “It doesn’t. I was up there at Russell’s place just now,” he said. “Fresh tire tracks. That you?”

  “It was. Late yesterday.”

  “Most reporter types, even the ones from Japan, they came out last week, gone home. You sorta runnin’ late, ain’t ya?”

  Sully smiled, recognizing the jibe for what it was. Man pronounced it “jap-ann.”

  “The first wave, deputy, they come and they go. Then you get the second wave, the magazine writers, long deadlines.”

  “So, the Harpers,” the deputy said again. He’d never offered his name, not at the beginning and not in return when Sully handed him his card. Sully couldn’t make out the name on the little silver bar on his chest and didn’t want to peer. Extending an arm from his side, putting a palm on one of the columns, the deputy leaned into it heavily, taking a load off, letting out a sigh. He was half looking at Sully, half squinting over the prairie, like he was expecting somebody on horseback to come galloping over the horizon. Sully put his age at maybe thirty-five.

  “You want to know about the old lady’s suicide,” the deputy said. “Seems sorta women’s gossip, you ask me.”

  “But I’m not asking,” Sully said. “I’m just interested in knowing what happened.”

  “We’re not taking notes h
ere, are we?”

  “Not unless we say so.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “This place, it’s been abandoned since I was a kid,” the deputy said, and spit again, rolling the chaw over to the left side of his jaw. “The local haunted house. Your Wicker Man, you want that. Me, I was always thinking it was like, that place, you ever hear tell of the little town in Kansas where that family got killed and that little gay guy what wrote a book about it?”

  “The Clutter family,” Sully said. “Capote. In Cold Blood. Holcomb, that’s the town.”

  “That’s the one. Liked that movie. Don’t know why they made it in black and white. But what I’m saying, everybody talked about that. It got to be famous. This suicide here? It wasn’t like that. You a kid here, you didn’t want to ask your folks, your teachers. It was something you were supposed to whisper about, at least when the adults were around. Maybe because it was suicide, which out here, for the churchgoing, means you going to Hell. Everybody’s churchgoing out here. I don’t know. Anyhow. It got to be a thing kids would tell at campfires, spooky story nights, at the drive-in. If and when you got drunk, you’d dare somebody to come out here at midnight. I did it and had it done to me.”

  “Everyplace you go,” Sully said, keeping him talking, his antennae picking up now, “there’s a spot like that.”

  “I imagine. But this place here,” here the deputy leaned back to rap on the column with his knuckles, to look at the house behind them, “would scare the shit out of you. Off the road, in the dark, at night, wind coming up, coyote or a coon or something in the house, scratching around? It’d shrivel your pair right up tight, I can tell you that. Particularly if you’re fifteen and drunk.”

  “I bet.”

  “It’s a million versions of the story, but the way I’m going to tell it to you, I heard from Sheriff Lewis, he was the law at the time, and he was the one what came out here that day. So that’s the only firsthand account I know.