by Ninie Hammon
Carter had Riley Campbell’s undivided attention now.
*
Carter saw him! Or saw something. Grayson was almost sure because all at once his brother engaged Riley in an animated whispered conversation that Grayson’s muffled hearing reduced to a few intelligible words.
He ignored it, concentrating on the infinitely slow ballet of movement that had transported his body a little over seven feet in the past ninety minutes. He controlled his breathing; chest barely moving. Face sliding across the ground, eyes open a slit, measured blinks that took at least thirty seconds each.
He had emptied his mind of all thought, calmed his heartbeat, placed his whole being in a kind of suspended animation that was absolutely here, feeling every grain of dirt, twig and leaf he touched, with no thought beyond the next pebble his cheek encountered as it coursed slowly down his face.
He had come to the most psychologically challenging part of the journey. His whole upper body was now completely out of sight behind a rock. All that remained in the short stand of grass were his legs from the knees down and his feet. He must not change his movement now, though, and must continue to crawl with the same agonizing slowness, face in the dirt, eyes squinting.
His heart took up a heavier beat, and he allowed himself the luxury of allowing his chest to expand with his breaths. Not inching along. Millimetering along.
*
Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to get Riley talking about shine. It had definitely captured his entire attention, but he was getting more and more agitated by Carter’s revelations.
“You lyin’!” Riley spat at him, his voice low and tense. He had grown too upset to whisper. “You tellin’ me you got stills in three places up on Stag Ridge? No possible way. Ain’t no water up there.”
“Wrong, wrong and wrong,” Carter said, matching Riley’s volume, providing cover for any small sound that might…if Grayson was really out there. But how could he be? Carter hadn’t dared look a second time, and all he’d seen was a lump, kind of a dark shape, a shadow. No, couldn’t have been Grayson. And why would it be? Grayson should have been here hours ago—and Carter was convinced his brother had, indeed, gotten to the rocks then. Grayson wouldn’t have been calling out to Sadie. He’d have come up quietly, seen what was going down, and done the only sensible thing—run. A man’s intent on shooting you and you’re unarmed, you run. No shame in that! Why would Grayson risk his life for…still, Carter thought he’d seen something, so he kept up the charade with Riley. What else was there to do?
“No, I’m not lying. Yes, I got stills on Stag Ridge. And yes, there’s water there. A spring, but we had to dig down for it. Spotted some water dripping out a crack in a rock. Took almost six months to dig it out, but now it produces all the water we need, cold and clear.”
“An you ’xpect me to b’lieve that? That you McCulloughs can call water out of a stone? Can you fly, too?”
“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact we can,” Grayson called out from the granite outcrop above their heads, and Carter was afraid Riley was going to shoot him in surprise. The little man leaped to his feet, his eyes huge, and swung the rifle in the direction of the voice.
“How’d you get up there?” he gasped, swinging the rifle back and forth, trying to cover the whole top of the rock at once.
Grayson didn’t answer.
“You hear me? I said how’d you get up there?”
Still no answer.
“Answer me”—he turned and pointed the rifle at Carter—“or I’m gonna plug a hole in your brother’s belly so he bleeds out slow and painful.”
“I told you,” Grayson said. “I flew.”
But the voice didn’t come from where it had before. It was impossible to see the flat top of the huge slab of granite from below, of course, and Grayson was now at the far end of it.
Riley swung the rifle in that direction.
“You stay right where you are, you hear me?”
There was a clatter of rocks halfway back toward them from where Grayson’s voice had just come.
“I said stay put.” He turned the rifle on Carter and cocked it. “Your brother’s got less than a minute’s worth of breathing unless—”
“You’re not going to kill Carter,” Grayson said. He’d moved again, but not all the way to the far end of the rock. Riley swung the rifle in the direction of the voice, tried to adjust.
“I ain’t? Really? Well, listen to this gunshot and then tell me I—”
“Because my brother is your ticket out of the electric chair.”
Grayson was in a different spot. Not far this time from where he’d just been, but enough so Riley wasn’t exactly sure where he was. And Riley wasn’t demanding he be still anymore.
Carter watched the drama with increasing admiration, almost as a spectator. Grayson had done such an astonishing thing, to show up out of nowhere like he did, that Riley was clearly rattled. And in little and big ways, Grayson was keeping him off balance.
“How you figure that? Like I told that sister of mine who’s gonna be a widow before the sun sets, I ain’t trying to get away with nothing. I’m gonna kill the both of you and then go to Suzie’s Place, buy beers all around, and tell the world where to come and find your worthless bodies. Shoot, if I’s an injun, I’d scalp you and show ’em the hair.”
“No you’re not,” Grayson said calmly. “Because you don’t want to scream out your last breath in agony when they turn on the juice and fry you in Moundsville. Ever seen a man fry, Riley? They bite their tongues off, and their eyeballs squirt out of the sockets and dangle on their cheeks.”
Carter watched Riley’s face grow pale. He’d turned to cover Grayson’s new position without a word of protest. Grayson had moved to the far end of the rock again but didn’t raise his voice, and Riley unconsciously took a couple of steps in that direction to hear him. “Only that’s not going to happen to you, Riley, because you’re going to walk away from this a free man, going to grow old bragging to your grandchildren how you made the McCulloughs pay for shooting your little brother.”
Riley said nothing.
When Grayson spoke again, he’d moved really quickly halfway back down the rock so he was right above Riley, and he spoke in a menacing whisper.
“And you’re not going to scalp anybody, Riley. You don’t have a knife. I’m the one with a knife.”
***
When Maggie opened her eyes, the sun had moved down behind the mountain, taking the light in the cloudy sky with it. The two children no longer lay in the shade of the azalea bush but in a deep shadow beneath it.
There were no butterflies, and Maggie wasn’t sure if there ever had been or if she had just dreamed it.
She sat up and looked tenderly down at Sadie still asleep beside her. Though she had no memory of before, Maggie was absolutely certain she had never in her life loved anyone as much as she loved this child. Sometimes the ache of it welled up in her chest, and she could hardly catch her breath.
Brushing her lips softly across Sadie’s cheek, she whispered, “Wake up, little pretty.”
Sadie opened her eyes—purple eyes!—and looked up at her.
“Mabie loves Sabie,” Maggie said softly.
Sadie reached up, put her arms around Maggie’s neck and hugged her sleepily, a small smile denting shallow dimples in her cheeks.
“I need go potty,” she said.
She stood and Maggie helped her down with her panties, holding her so it didn’t splash on her legs. Then Maggie gathered the pink blankie into a sack, putting in the last small piece of cheese, half an apple and the flashlight with the empty mason jar. They’d filled the jar with water out of a small creek they’d crossed long before they got to the big pile of rocks she could see across the meadow. But the jar had no lid, and she’d spilled the rest of the water hours ago.
When Sadie saw the jar, she whined, “I’m thirssy.”
“We’ll get you a drink soon as we can,” Maggie said brightly. “We need t
o walk a little first.” She reached into the blanket sack and retrieved the half apple. “This’ll wet your lips.” She’d given all the food to Sadie and had eaten nothing herself. “You wanna walk or ride?”
“Hold you.”
Maggie hefted Sadie up onto her hip and headed into the woods away from the meadow. As soon as she awoke, black had bloomed menacingly inside Maggie’s head. In fact, it felt like the black was seeping out into the world around her. Maybe the woods really were dark, but she didn’t think so. She thought the dark was coming from her. She had to get Sadie away. Away and up.
She put Sadie down on the ground.
“Come on, sugar. Can you run with me?”
It was flat here, for a little while, before the land began to climb again. And they had to move fast. The black was coming.
“Run with me, Sadie! Come on!”
The black smile in the distance grinned down on them as the two little girls, one with flaming red braids and the other with blond curls, ran through the trees toward the rising mountainside.
***
Riley Campbell was spooked. Grayson could hear it in his voice. But he was interested, too. It hadn’t entered his pea-sized brain that there was any way he could make it out of a double murder alive.
“How you figure I kill you and Carter and they let me walk?”
“You’re not going to kill both of us. You’re just going to kill me. If you can, that is. You’re going to let Carter live—hey, you said yourself he’s the one McCullough you know didn’t shoot Zeke—because Carter’s going to save your miserable little life.”
As soon as he finished speaking, he hurried halfway down the rock.
“You don’t think I can kill you? How you figure that? I’m the man with a gun, and if you’d been packing you’d a shot me a long time ago. You got a knife, you say? Well, bring it on. We’ll see how you fare—”
“And that’s how Carter’s going to save your life.”
“Talk sense or I’m gonna—” he began, as he moved to stand below where Grayson was speaking.
Yes! Riley was totally unaware that Grayson now controlled where the little man stood.
“Carter’s going to make you a free man because he’s going to tell the sheriff that Riley Campbell didn’t ambush a U.S. army chaplain who came home from the war with a pocket full of medals. He shot a madman with a knife who was trying to kill him. He shot Grayson Addington in self-defense.”
Riley said nothing at all. Good! He was thinking. And while he thought, Grayson moved. All the way to the low end of the rock, where the space between it and the nearest boulder was the narrowest. When Riley stood there, he was at the closest possible point to the outcrop.
“You’re saying you’re gonna come at me with a knife so I can shoot you?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Grayson said from his new position and held his breath. Sure enough, Riley walked down to the end of the rock below him to hear the rest of what he had to say. “I said I’m going to jump you, and if you shoot me first, it’s self-defense. But if I get you…”
He let his words trail off. Let the silence drag out before he picked up the big rock he’d set aside for this purpose and threw it as far as he could down the length of the flat top of the granite outcrop. It hit, made a crunching sound and rolled toward the edge.
Then Grayson took his life into his hands. Betting that Riley had started to move toward the sound and had turned his back, Grayson stepped out in plain sight and leaped off the rock.
Riley was directly beneath him. He was, indeed, facing the other end of the rock, but he heard Grayson’s movement and was turning back as Grayson leaped. He tried to fire but couldn’t get a shot off before Grayson was on him.
There was no fight. Grayson had eight inches and, even as thin as he was, fifty pounds on Riley. He drove Riley into the ground, and the freshly sharpened blade of his knife was at the little man’s throat before Riley could suck in the breath that’d been knocked out of him.
“If I get you,” Grayson growled. “I slit your worthless throat. In self-defense, of course.”
He dug the blade into Riley’s neck and watched the blood begin to flow.
Chapter 27
As Grayson Addington drew the razor edge of his knife across Riley Campbell’s neck, Nelson Warren sat at a workbench in his garage a hundred miles away and put the finishing touches on a bomb.
He mopped the concentration sweat from his brow with a monogrammed white handkerchief and sat back to survey his handiwork.
Not bad!
He had put considerable time and energy into figuring out what it would take to cause the proper amount of damage—which would not, of course, be catastrophic. He only wanted to blow a hole in Impoundment Dam No. 2—not a large hole, really, just one too big to repair, though his crews would make heroic efforts to do so. One so big that if—no, Grigsby had said when—the dam started springing leaks of its own, nobody’d even notice. Or if they did, they wouldn’t blame Northfield Coal. Oh, no, no, no. They’d blame somebody whose last name was Campbell!
Shoot, the hole in the dam might release enough pressure to prevent more leakage, so when the sludge water was all drained out, it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to repair the thing. But all that was a long way out. It would take several weeks, maybe a month, for the lake to drain. One hundred and forty million gallons was a lot of waste water. And the sticky, oily mess the black water would leave behind…it’d take way longer than a month for the unfortunates downstream to clean that up.
Warren had already established that he intended to take Bobby fishing on Sunday morning, so it would be no surprise when he couldn’t be located immediately to be notified about the explosion. But as soon as he returned home to the bad news, he would rush to Sadler Hollow to inspect the damage and then offer every resource at his disposal to facilitate the evacuation of residents below Dam No. 1—as a precautionary measure only, of course. He’d express his sincere hope that workers would be able to repair what someone had done to the dam. But if the damage was too extensive…well, that was out of his hands.
Warren wallowed the unlit cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right and gingerly inspected the sticks of dynamite he’d rigged together to blow from a single fuse. A long fuse. He intended to be well up on the hillside above the dam before the actual explosion. The hillside afforded a view of both lakes and both dams.
Warren had the perfect place to set the charge in No. 2—the drain pipe Grigsby was forever mewling about. Two years ago, rains had been fierce, and the little chief engineer had persuaded Warren to construct an emergency spillway in the dam to relieve the pressure. Like the hole in the top of a sink, if the water ever came dangerously close to the top of the dam, it would hit the pipe first and drain out. They dug into the eighty-five-foot-tall structure on the downhill side about twenty feet from the top to set a pipe three feet in diameter all the way through it. They’d made it four hundred feet into the five-hundred-foot width of the dam, laying pipe as they went, before budget cuts put the project on hold. In a tight economy, there were better uses of men and resources than digging a hole in a dam.
Nelson intended to set his charge inside Grigsby’s drain pipe, place the dynamite at the far end and feed the fuse out behind him as he crawled backward to the entrance. A fuse that long would give him plenty of time to get to safety before the charge blew.
He studied the bomb. Had he used enough dynamite?
He wasn’t sure. He’d watched miners set blasts when he was in training, but he’d never actually done it himself. And he couldn’t very well ask somebody to show him how. The sticks he’d snatched during his inspection of a strip mine in Logan County were far bigger than the ones they’d used long ago in the mine where he’d worked, and more powerful, too, he was sure. But how much more powerful—that he didn’t know.
What if his bomb only damaged the dam but didn’t knock a hole all the way through it? That would be worse than doing not
hing at all. Federal inspectors would be crawling all over the dam then, thicker than flies on road kill.
He picked up three more sticks of dynamite, paused, picked up two more, and went back to work.
***
“Grayson, wait! You can’t just slit his throat.”
Carter had leaped forward and snatched Riley’s rifle up off the ground when he’d dropped it. He now stood with it pointed at Riley, who lay on his back with Grayson on top of him, sinking his knife into the skin of Riley’s neck.
Grayson turned and looked up into Carter’s face, and with the tiniest movement, a lifted eyebrow, widening eyes, an almost imperceptible nod, gave him the “brother look,” and Carter read it like a blind man with his fingers on raised dots.
“He’ll die too quick,” Carter continued. “That’s not how he planned to take you out.”
“You’re right,” Grayson said, and reduced the pressure on the blade that had made a thin, red smile under Riley’s chin. “You’re definitely going to be taking a dirt nap today, as we used to say in ’Nam, but I’m not going to plant you quick. I want to enjoy this.”
He got off Riley, then reached down, yanked the little man to his feet and flung him like a rag doll up against the rock. Riley’s eyes were dark pools of threat and hatred, the color of a murky well in which a possum or rat had drowned. But he stared at Grayson now in surprise, horror and wonder. Grayson knew he must look a sight! Dirt and mud covered his clothes and every exposed body part; grass, leaves and moss were mashed into his hair; and stems of grass stuck out of his shirt collar, cuffs, the waistband of his pants, and the tops of his filthy brown socks like straw on the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. His appearance alone had Riley totally spooked. And that was good. Real good.