The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

by Sharyn McCrumb

  McCullough had to take his photos at the dress rehearsal, and then he'd had to attend the play the next night as well, for as sure as he got lazy and skipped the real performance, somebody would get sick and use a standin, or some fiasco would happen onstage, and if his story came out in the paper without those details, everybody would know he'd fudged his review. So he went to the play, and of course nothing out of the ordinary did happen, so here he was, at eleven o'clock at night, hunched over his keyboard, finishing up the play review, and trying to get the front page laid out, so he could drive to the Johnson City print shop tomorrow and put the newspaper together.

  It was a lot of trouble for a feature; a daily would have been able to handle the rush with all their staff, but he had to do the best he could with his own efforts on unpaid overtime. He couldn't do without the article on Hamlet. His readers cared about activities at the high school, and he had a solemn responsibility to keep them informed. At twenty-eight, Jeff McCullough was a serious and dedicated journalist, hoping for better things. He loosened his tie and yawned, wondering how long he could live on hot dogs and Twinkies.

  McCullough was going through the mimeographed program, double-checking his spelling of cast names, when he heard the knock at the door. "We're closed!" he yelled. Why couldn't people turn in their "Free Kitten" ads during regular business hours?

  The knock this time was louder. 146

  The editor threw down his pencil, and stalked to the door. The shade had been pulled down to cover the glass, and in front of it dangled a sign that said Closed. McCullough peered past these obstructions, and saw two old men peering back at him. Maybe it's a fire or something, he thought, flipping back the brass lock. He pulled open the door, motioning for them to come inside.

  "We're actually closed," Jeff McCullough told the men as he ushered them in. "Is this some sort of emergency?"

  "We think so," said the thinner of the two. He looked about seventy, but his face had a pale, pinched look that didn't bode well for his health. His red flannel shirt looked at least a size too big for him. "I'm Tavy Annis," he said, "And this is my friend Taw McBryde. We got to talking tonight at the cafe about what we ought to do, and when we saw your lights on, we figured we'd come over here and see what you thought."

  "Yeah, we think you ought to publicize the situation," said the heavyset man beside him.

  Jeff McCullough glanced at his watch. He still had a good hour's work to do. He looked again at the two visitors. They were waiting patiently, unsmiling, and as far as he could tell, neither of them was drunk. Oh, what the hell, he thought. It's never too early to start working on next week's edition. "Why don't you have a seat over here, and tell me what this is all about," he said aloud.

  He offered them coffee, and they thanked him 147

  politely and said no. When he'd got a fresh cup for himself, and settled in his swivel chair, facing them, the thin one, Tavy, began to speak. "I've lived here in Wake County all my life, right by the Little Dove River for over fifty years. A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor because I was feeling poorly, and he said I got cancer. There's not much hope."

  Jeff McCullough blinked. "I'm really sorry."

  "Tell him the rest, Tavy," the other man said. He took out a cigarette, looked at it, and tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. "Force of habit," he muttered to no one in particular.

  "The doctor at the clinic said there have been a lot of cancer deaths among people who live near the Little Dove River on account of that paper company in North Carolina dumping pollutants in the water. I could give you his name if you wanted to interview him."

  "Maybe you ought to drive over to the paper company, too. Interview them," Taw McBryde suggested. "We need to put a stop to this polluting right now."

  McCullough looked from one man to the other. "That's a big story," he said at last.

  Tavy Annis looked pleased. "We figured the people in this county had a right to know about it."

  "They probably do," said the editor. "But . . . I'm not sure how to explain this. It's not a story the Record could really handle."

  "Why not?" snapped Taw. "It's sure as hell local interest."

  Tavy Annis twisted his hands. "We're not 148

  cranks, you know. I didn't believe it myself at first, but what we're telling you is the truth."

  McCullough nodded. "Yes, sir, I know, but it's a very complicated issue. I'm a one-man newspaper staff putting out one paper a week. Now, to do a complex environmental story, you'd need reporters talking to government officials, paper-company people, cancer researchers. I don't think my budget would even cover the phone bills on this story, even supposing I had the time to devote to it, which I'm afraid I don't. And then there's the possibility of a lawsuit from the paper company for libel."

  "Libel! It's the truth! They're poisoning people!"

  "Yeah, but that paper company is rich. And they probably have a whole stable full of lawyers on retainer just to fight cases like this, whereas we would have to hire one to defend us, and in a lawsuit, being right can be just as expensive as being wrong. Even if we won, they'd appeal until we ran out of money." He shook his head. "That wouldn't take long!"

  They sat in silence while the two men digested this information. Finally, with a look of disgust, Taw said, "So you won't help us fight them?"

  McCullough let out a weary sigh. "Look, you don't want me. I have very little power and damn few resources. How much trouble can you stir up with a podunk weekly newspaper in rural Tennessee? You have the right idea about using publicity, but you need to aim higher."

  Tavy looked thoughtful. "The Johnson City Press-Chronicle?"

  The editor stopped himself from laughing just in time. "A little higher than that, guys. How about 60 Minutes, or the Donahue show? What you need is national exposure on this thing so that public opinion will force the company to clean up its act. Have you written to your congressman?"

  Tavy nodded sullenly. "Yep. Haven't heard anything yet."

  "That's a good first step, though. At least you've put your concern on the record, so to speak." He frowned, tapping the end of his pencil against his thigh. "I wish I could think of somebody to put you in touch with. There must be some environmental groups in the state. I can ask around. Before you go public with this crusade, you really need some hard evidence."

  Taw McBryde scowled. "My buddy is dying. Isn't that proof enough?"

  "No. Who's to say how he got cancer? Maybe he ate apples soaked in weed killer. What doesn't cause cancer these days? Do you know exactly what chemicals are in the river water?"

  "Have you seen that river?" asked Tavy. "It looks like tobacco spit. The fish are deformed."

  "I know." McCullough shuddered. "There's no question about the pollution. I wouldn't even go out on the Little Dove in a boat, but saying that it looks bad isn't evidence of cancer-causing chemicals. You should try to get somebody to test the water. To analyze it, so you can say for sure what chemicals it contains, and 150

  then find out if any of those chemicals are used by the paper company."

  Tavy Annis shifted in his chair. "That's a lot of work to ask of a dying man."

  "Yes, sir," said McCullough. "But it's the only way you're going to accomplish anything. Trying to stop that paper company by putting an article in the Hamelin Record would be like trying to shoot down a B-52 with a slingshot."

  Taw McBryde stood up, signaling that the meeting was over. "Thank you for your time, son," he said. "You've given us a lot to think about. Sorry to bother you so late."

  "I only wish there were more I could do," said Jeff McCullough. He showed the two men to the door and then went back to his article on the Hamelin High production of Hamlet. Suddenly, his job seemed ridiculously trivial.

  On the lamp table beside the couch his mug of coffee grew cold, but Joe LeDonne didn't care. He had forgotten that it was there. He stared into the fireplace, watching the flames make fire music on wood and following his memories back to other, less contained con
flagrations. In his present state of mind, it would have been safer to watch Letterman or even to call Martha and spend the night at her place, but LeDonne seldom took the safe route. Besides, there was no point in disturbing anyone else at this hour just because he couldn't sleep. Martha had to be at work at eight, same as he did, but she required more sleep to do it. Better for him to 151

  commune with the flames. He was used to being alone.

  He had chosen this two-bedroom frame house because it had a fireplace in its small living room. And because the fifties bungalow came cheap. He'd given it a coat of paint, and hauled in some secondhand furniture he'd picked up in Johnson City, and he was satisfied. Martha was always after him to hang some pictures, or to get the couch reupholstered, but somehow, without actually arguing with her about it, he never did. He didn't want the place to start looking like home to him. He didn't have a home. The people in the veterans' support group over in Knoxville had a lot to say about that, and the word martyr figured heavily in their comments, but what they thought or said didn't change anything. This was who he was, and Martha could either take that or leave it.

  He had spent about half an hour now with his ghosts, reliving the old battles, watching the old deaths as helplessly as ever. Remembering was sort of like saying a rosary: Mike, Bajo, Simmons, Sweet Sam, Parnell. Now he had gone into his memories and come out on the other side, and the pain it brought was so familiar that it was comforting. Comforting to feel anything at all. Now he could consider new things. LeDonne was thinking about a man on a dirt road with a rifle and the rolling walk of an infantryman in a jungle war.

  After his encounter with the cocksure Justin Warren, LeDonne had made some inquiries about the property back there: 200 acres, 152

  mostly wooded, adjoining the national forest. The deed listed a 1,200-square-foot cabin and some outbuildings on the land. It had a stream, a right of way to the road, and a well, but no electricity. The power lines didn't go out that far, and apparently Warren hadn't requested that they extend the service to include him. That figured. It told LeDonne what he was there for.

  There were only two things that would bring a man like Warren out of Nashville to buy property in the east Tennessee mountains. The first possibility was drugs. Marijuana was a big cash crop these days, and Appalachia was a prime place to grow it. Smart felons grew the stuff on national forest land, because if the law caught you growing illegal substances on your own land, they could confiscate the property. Grow it on government land and all you stand to lose is the crop—and maybe a few years of your life. But Warren wasn't a marijuana planter, because he didn't have any electricity. These days the feds caught big-time growers by checking electric bills in rural counties. The high-tech tools of drug farming—high-wattage sodium halide lights, big coolers, and ventilation fans attached to barns—used a lot more power than the average home consumed. Some growers tried to evade detection by bypassing the electric meter, but Warren couldn't do that because no wires went close to his land.

  Besides, when LeDonne encountered Warren on the road, the man had been too calm to have felonies on his conscience. He didn't look like a 153

  Sierra Club bird-watcher, either, though. Warren was up to something.

  The deputy would bet anything that Justin Warren had bought a little place in the backwoods so he could keep playing soldier. Maybe he was the kind of moron who thought that World War III was right around the corner, and that the Appalachians would keep him safe by blocking the fallout when they nuked Washington and Oak Ridge. If that was the case, Warren would be stocking up on canned goods, batteries, and bottled water, waiting for civilization to go boom! so that he and his lost boys could enjoy their never-never land together.

  If he wasn't a survivalist, then he was running a training camp for mercenaries. Every weekend a dozen cars would go into the forest road, and stay parked there until Sunday night, while their gung-ho owners scurried around through the woods with greasepaint on their faces, pretending to be in boot camp. These would-be Rambos would run obstacle courses through the woods, climb ropes, scramble over log walls, and take turns tracking each other in the forest at night, just for the hell of it. LeDonne doubted if many of them would be veterans. Just Warren, their fearless leader. The others were usually Wannabes, playing army. Most people who had done it for real wouldn't be caught dead out there.

  Survivalist or mercenary camp counselor.

  Neither of those exercises in absurdity was

  strictly illegal, but they both had the potential

  for trouble. Strangers with guns are not a good

  thing in any county. Let those assholes accidentally shoot a couple of Appalachian Trail hikers, and the shit would really fly, LeDonne thought. Besides, they could frighten the locals, disrupt legitimate hunters, and make generally less than desirable neighbors.

  LeDonne decided that he ought to pay Justin Warren a visit some weekend, just to remind him of some of the local ordinances concerning firearms, trespassing, and controlled substances. But first he'd tell Spencer where he was going, in case any of the Wannabes got trigger-happy.

  Maggie Underhill wished they had remembered to leave some lights on at the farm when they went to the play. How could we have forgotten? she thought. It was dark when we left. The house, a white shape in the darkness, loomed ominously ahead of them. Just as it had that night in October when their brother Joshua had turned out all the lights and then . . . turned out all the lights. She shuddered.

  In the darkness beside her, Mark spoke for the first time since they had left the school. "Damn! It's going to be so cold in there. I hate a cold house, but there's no way the wood stove could have kept burning for all these hours, so I didn't bother to light it. I wish Dad had put central heating in this mausoleum."

  "It was too expensive," Maggie said. "Remember? When Mom and Dad first looked at the house, they talked about it, but the contrac-155

  tor's estimates were very high, and they decided not to."

  "Sure. Dad couldn't have afforded it on his military pension, and trust Mom not to get off her butt and get a job, but he could have used the other money, couldn't he?"

  "What other money, Mark?"

  He pulled the car up past the lilac bush, close to the open woodshed. As he opened the car door, his face was illuminated for a moment in the cab light. His smile was secretive and sly. "You know about the other money, don't you, Maggie?" he whispered. "We shouldn't talk about it, though."

  Maggie pulled her coat close about her, and followed her brother up the stone path to the side porch, where they had left the kitchen door unlocked. As she reached the steps, Mark flipped on the kitchen light, and then the hall light, and the living-room light, as he made his way about the house. He wouldn't admit it, but the darkness of the house frightened him, too. It was impossible to enter the house without remembering the night they had found the bodies. But all the lights had been on then, hadn't they?

  She hoped Mark was going to light the fire, and that the house would be warm by morning. Otherwise, she would skip breakfast, or maybe school altogether. She hated the cold. It was like being dead. She wasn't particularly interested in going back to school, now that the play'was over, anyway. All the lessons seemed so pointless. Algebra. Who cared? 156

  She had just stepped into the kitchen when the wall telephone began to ring. The suddenness of the blast of noise close beside her made her gasp, letting out a little cloud of warm breath in the chilled room. She looked around at the sinkful of dirty dishes, the dingy floor, and the cluttered kitchen table, holding her breath, waiting. The phone pealed again, and Mark did not appear in the doorway to answer it, so, to stop the noise in her ears, Maggie picked it up. "Hello?"

  "Maggie? It's good to hear your voice. You did all right in the play tonight. You remembered all your lines, and you looked beautiful. I'm real proud."

  "Thank you." The cold in the kitchen seemed to penetrate Maggie's brown wool coat, and travel up her arm into the receiver, and
finally into her brain. The words took several heartbeats to register after she heard them, and by the time she had recognized the voice and realized all the implications of hearing it, she realized that they had been talking such a long time, and so amicably, that it would be pointless to scream, so she kept listening, and watching her breath make clouds in front of her. The voice was saying kind things, soothing words.

  "I've missed you, Maggie, and I thought you might be sort of lonely, too. So I thought I'd just tell you that everything is all right, and you did fine tonight. Now why don't you clean up the kitchen, all right? It's an awful mess. Why don't you clean it up before you go to bed?"

  Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. "All right, Josh. Good-bye."

  Maggie hung up the phone, and slid off her coat, heedless of the cold. She cleared the stack of food-encrusted dishes out of the sink, and filled it with hot water and dish soap. Humming tunelessly in the freezing kitchen, Maggie Underhill began to clean up the mess.

  CHAPTER 8

  Little girl, tell me where did you get that dress,

  And the shoes that are so new? —I got the dress from a railroad man,

  And the shoes from a man in the mines. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never

  shines,

  And I shiver when the cold wind blows.

  —"In the Pines"

  "I have been doing some research," said Tavy Annis, taking a sip of his iced tea. He still looked thin and haggard, but there was an animation in his face that had been absent for many weeks. He sat in their usual booth at the grill with a plate of uneaten meat loaf pushed away from him, a manila folder filled with papers in its place.