When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  “Remember that time I told you about when we were questioning gooks?” Grayson said to Carter.

  “Which time? The time you cut the guy’s ears off and stuffed them down his throat?”

  “No, the other time.” Grayson ambled over to where Riley cowered against the rock face. “The time we castrated the guy and—hey, look at that, Carter.” He pointed to a widening dark stain on the front of Riley’s pants. “Mr. Campbell isn’t a big boy—he didn’t go wee-wee in the potty.”

  Grayson laughed, the sound as metallic as coins dropping into the slot of a pay phone.

  “In ’Nam, if we found a guy like you in our unit, we killed him ourselves. It’s called friendly fire. But there’s nothing friendly about cutting bullies down to size. They’re all the same, nothing but gutless little cowards.”

  He was standing right beside Riley now.

  “And speaking of cutting…” He held up the knife with Riley’s blood dripping down the dirty blade.

  Riley looked pleadingly at Carter.

  “He’s crazy, Carter. You can see that. Nuts. You got the gun. Shoot me!”

  Grayson leaned close, smelled the twin stinks of urine and fear sweat, and fought off a wave of memories.

  “No, Riley, I’m not crazy. And you’re waaaay more than just a coward. You’re stupid! You’re an idiot and a fool! You very nearly gave whoever really did shoot Zeke a free ride past go and two hundred dollars.”

  Grayson leaned even closer, inches from Riley’s face, and dropped each word like an individual stone into a pond. “Because. It. Wasn’t. Me!”

  There was genuine shock and surprise on Riley’s face. Not disbelief, though. Very good!

  “But…you was coming out of the woods…you almost shot the sheriff with the .22 you was carrying. Ramona told Crystal.” The sheriff’s big-mouth secretary. Figured. “And she told—”

  “I went squirrel hunting, you moron!” Grayson roared. He said the next words slowly: “Where the squirrels are.” Everybody knew the best squirrel hunting was on the west side of Naked Turtle Mountain—not around Blood Creek. “But I didn’t shoot any. I never fired the rifle. Which the sheriff will find out when he gets around to looking into such things. And when he matches the bullet they pulled out of Zeke’s back, he’ll see it didn’t come from my gun.”

  “That’s a stupid Campbell for you,” Carter scoffed from behind Grayson. “Ends up in the electric chair for killing the two people who didn’t shoot his little brother. Real sweet revenge, Riley. Give that man a kewpie doll.”

  Grayson could see the gears turning in Riley’s head.

  “Then who did shoot Zeke?” he bawled.

  “I’ve been back in Sadler Hollow for six days,” Grayson said quietly. Then he rumbled, “How would I know?” Riley flinched back from him. “I know it wasn’t me, and you know it wasn’t Carter. Who does that leave?”

  “It was a McCullough!” Riley bleated in fearful defiance.

  Grayson sighed. “Maybe it was. Or maybe it was some guy Zeke cheated at poker or the boyfriend of some girl he flirted with. Or space aliens! What I do know is I came this close to dying today for something I didn’t do.” He held the knife up in front of Riley’s nose. “And that piece of Spam, my friend, is on your sandwich!”

  “Look, Grayson, I didn’t know…I thought…” Riley was groveling, sniveling. “I mean, you was in the woods, you tried to shoot the sheriff. What was I supposed to…anybody woulda thought…” But he was sincere. If there was one thing Grayson was good at—or used to be anyway—it was reading people, and Riley meant what he was saying.

  Inwardly, Grayson relaxed. Whew! He had accomplished what he’d set out to do—convince the little weasel that he was innocent. Because if Grayson couldn’t do that, the only way he and his family would ever be safe from Riley was to kill him. And Grayson did not want to kill his wife’s older brother—not when she already thought he’d paralyzed the younger one.

  Riley slumped against the rock when Grayson stepped back and turned to Carter.

  “What do you say Carter? He was going to kill you, and he knew you didn’t do it. What should we do with him?”

  “We make him pay!” Carter growled. Riley looked stricken. “Unless he helps us find Sadie.”

  “I will! I will. I’ll comb these woods, look under every rock, up every—”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll hightail it out of these woods and go get help,” Grayson said.

  “We’ve only got a couple more hours of daylight,” Carter said, then turned with the gun toward Riley. “Because we wasted the whole afternoon on you!”

  “If we can’t find them before dark, I want an army of searchers out here at first light,” Grayson said. “And if you don’t arrange that, I will come looking for you when this is all over.” He cleared the distance between him and Riley in two long strides, gathered the little man’s T-shirt up in his fist and slammed him back against the rock. “I learned things in ’Nam, Riley, ways to kill a man slow. I will find you, and I will make you wish that the worst thing that happened to you before you died was your eyeballs popping out on your cheeks.”

  “I’ll bring the sheriff, the state police, I swear,” Riley gushed. “Why, shoot, I could get a dozen of the boys from Suzie’s Place to help me find my sweet little niece that got lost in the woods.”

  Grayson rolled his eyes, but he let go of Riley’s shirt, and the little man danced away out of his reach.

  “Go on, now—get!” Carter said. “If you don’t hurry, it’ll be dark before you get to the house.”

  “And you tell your sister—my wife!—when you get there that we’re okay, and that we’re not leaving these woods until we find Maggie and Sadie.”

  Riley cast a longing glance at his rifle in Carter’s hand but knew better than to ask for it back. He merely turned and took off running through the woods.

  Grayson and Carter stood and watched until he was out of sight.

  “Think he believed you?” Carter asked.

  Grayson turned to him. “Do you?”

  “Yeah, I do. I think he—”

  “Not what I’m asking. I’m asking, do you believe me? Do you think I shot Zeke?”

  The question caught Carter totally off guard. He looked shocked and—understandably, Grayson supposed—upset by it. Then he dropped Grayson’s gaze, looked at the ground and said, “No, Gray, I don’t think you shot Zeke.”

  Grayson started to ask if he’d help convince Piper of that, but the subject of Piper was not a can of worms that needed to be opened right now. So he asked instead, “Think we can trust Riley?”

  “What choice do we have?”

  Chapter 28

  Maggie was scared, but Sadie was too little to know there was anything to be scared of, so if Maggie acted like everything was fine, Sadie’d never know. But everything wasn’t fine. It was almost dark and with the cloudy sky, there was no full moon, no starlight. When the sun disappeared below the horizon out there beyond the mountains, it would be as pitch black in the woods as the inside of a lump of coal.

  It already was that dark inside her head.

  She had Marian’s flashlight. It had been sufficient to make their way without tripping through the minimal undergrowth in the forest early this morning. But in the profound dark after sundown, the pitiful little puddle of light it made when it peeled back the darkness would barely keep them from falling off a cliff.

  Where were they going to sleep? What were they going to eat?

  Maggie did not know how much longer she could keep staggering forward, carrying the two-year-old first on her hip, then on her back, and when it was flat enough, perched on her shoulders. Though her bare feet were tough, they were scratched and bruised from hours of walking on the uneven, rocky hillsides. Sadie now stubbornly refused to take a step on her own and merely whimpered and cried.

  She’d pop her thumb out of her mouth long enough to whine, “Sabie not wanna walk. Sabie wanna go home.” Then huge tears would form in
her purple eyes and slide down her rosy cheeks. “I want Mommy and Nana.”

  This wasn’t what Maggie had expected, not how she’d planned it at all.

  She’d had no idea how hard it would be to get to the top of the mountain! It hadn’t looked all that far from the house, and when she left she hadn’t been able to think beyond getting there—just up!

  Maggie had known she couldn’t climb straight up the mountainside. It was too steep, even if she hadn’t been carrying Sadie. She knew she’d have to cut across the mountain, angling ever higher and higher up the side until she reached the top. But once she got deep into the woods, “up” wasn’t always possible. The uphill way was often blocked by bushes and brush, rockslides or fallen trees. Or just unclimbable. When she finally struggled to the top of a crest, she’d see a taller one ahead. And another. They’d used up precious daylight sleeping, and for the last hour or so they had been forced by the terrain ever downward, not up. What would she do when the battery on the flashlight gave out? Sit huddled with Sadie under a bush all night—in the dark?

  She stopped and hiked Sadie up on her hip. She rested her weight for a moment on the stump of a tree.

  Sadie moaned in a pitiful, tired wail, “Sabie hungry.” Then she burst into real tears, sobbing as if her little heart would break. “I want my m-m-mommy!”

  Maggie’s voice cried out in anguish, too, silently, in the dark, hollow cavern of her mind where all the light had been gobbled up by the thing that was coming…coming…Please! I can’t find my way. She closed her eyes and begged simply, Help!

  When she opened her eyes again, she saw it.

  True, she’d been looking down at the circle of flashlight beam on the ground, picking her way around the tree roots and rocks. She hadn’t been looking ahead. Still, she could have sworn it hadn’t been there a minute ago. Up ahead, through the trees, was a light!

  * * *

  Carter was the one who finally said aloud what they both were thinking but didn’t want to admit.

  “Gray, we gotta make camp while there’s still light.”

  Long shadows melted into dusk and it was fast approaching that moment of change from light to dark when both and neither are all around.

  “They’re still out there somewhere.” Grayson’s voice was anguished. “We have to keep looking.”

  “If we couldn’t find them in broad daylight, you think we’re going to stumble across them in the dark?”

  Grayson said nothing.

  “I think we need to go back up to that little meadow we passed through a few minutes ago. There’s a creek, and maybe we can bag something to eat with this.” Carter held out the deer rifle.

  Grayson looked awful. He was still covered in the camouflage dirt he’d smeared on himself hours ago. More than that, he looked spent. He was the one, Carter reminded himself, who’d performed a miracle rescue, and the energy that must have taken was energy the thin man standing in the failing light didn’t have to spare.

  “We have to keep looking,” Grayson said. But he didn’t believe it, and Carter didn’t even bother to argue with him.

  “You sit down before you fall down,” Carter said. “There’s deer around here. I saw one this afternoon at Hickman’s, and I might get lucky at dusk in that meadow.”

  Whitetail deer stayed hidden in the shadows during the daytime but came out at dawn and dusk to feed in open areas. Since deer season didn’t open until November, the woods were well-stocked, the animals not yet skittish.

  “I’ll do it,” Grayson said, his voice flat and expressionless from exhaustion. “I’m a better shot.”

  Again, Carter didn’t argue and merely handed Grayson the rifle. The two started back through the woods to the meadow.

  * * *

  There was only one light on in the little cabin Maggie and Sadie approached through the woods. The rest of the house was black. Maggie had no idea what she’d say to the people who lived here, how she’d explain why she and Sadie were wandering around in the woods at night.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to explain anything. She knocked repeatedly on the back door, but no one answered. It was, of course, unlocked, so she opened it carefully and called out, “Is anyone home?”

  No response.

  Though she felt like Goldilocks in the fairytale book she read to Sadie, she walked into the kitchen uninvited and began to look around. She flashed the beam of light on the walls first, searching for switches. There were none. The house had no electricity. Then she shone the light along the rustic wood countertop and swept it across the kitchen table. That’s where she spotted the apple pie.

  Sadie made for it. She climbed up into a chair, stretched out across the table and buried her hands in the lattice crust before Maggie could stop her.

  “Sadie, wait!”

  But Sadie shoved the sticky hunks of dripping apples into her mouth with total abandon, and after only a moment of hesitation Maggie laid the flashlight on the table and joined her, not realizing until that moment how famished she was. They’d eaten half the pie in the space of about two minutes before she noticed the note on the table beside it. She licked the sticky off her fingers and held the flashlight to read it.

  “Thelma go on and take the pie I done made it and we cain’t go to the potluck after church cause my sister Mamie come git us. Ma’s took poorly again. Me and Harolds gone to see to her.”

  Joy spread over Maggie’s face. The house would be empty all night! No one would be here until before church tomorrow morning. She and Sadie had a place to stay.

  They continued to shove gooey hunks of pie into their mouths for a while, neither speaking, only making contented slurping, smacking sounds. Then Maggie licked her fingers clean a second time and picked up the flashlight.

  “Let’s go find that light we saw from outside,” she said.

  It wasn’t difficult to locate. The light shone out from a kerosene lamp that sat on a table in front of the window in a back bedroom. Maggie stared at it in wonder. Nobody just walked out of a house and left behind a lit kerosene lamp! Why hadn’t the lady who’d written the note leaned over the lamp and gone whoosh before she got into the car with sister Mamie and drove away?

  Better question—why was the lamp burning in the first place? It’d been daylight when the lady and her husband left.

  She and Sadie would still be out there in the dark, cold woods if this light hadn’t shown them the way. To shelter, safety, warmth, food. Maggie sank down into a rocker beside the bed and struggled not to burst into tears of relief. Sadie climbed wordlessly into her lap and stoppered her sticky lips with her thumb.

  * * *

  Grayson looked better. He’d cleaned the shocks of grass out of his shirt collar, pants and socks, washed his face and hands in the cold creek water, then dunked his head to get the dirt, twigs and moss out of his hair. He came up sputtering and gasping but obviously refreshed.

  Carter watched him in the flickering campfire light, glad he no longer looked so alien. Throughout the late afternoon, he’d had to struggle not to stare at his brother. Grayson’s wild appearance was a product of what he’d just done, and Carter wasn’t even entirely sure what that had been, much less how he’d managed to pull it off. But he understood perfectly the result. Grayson had saved Carter’s life.

  If their roles had been reversed, would Carter have done the same?

  Had he, in fact, ever in his life been the kind of brother to Grayson that Gray had been to him? When Becky died, everything had come apart; the world had split open like a giant ax had cleaved it in two. Gray was on one side of the fissure in their family, and Carter was on the other. Over the years, the crack continued to split wider and wider until their father finally toppled over the edge into the dark abyss, and the two brothers were so distant from each other they could never again connect. What had happened that day so long ago had…what had happened? If he only knew for certain, he…would what? What was there to be done, then or now?

  He reached over
and turned the makeshift spit where the hunk of venison hissed and sputtered in the flames. The chunk of meat they’d ripped out of the flank of the little doe Grayson had felled with one shot wouldn’t be cooked very evenly—probably burned on one side and half raw on the other, but the two men were so famished, their mouths were watering at the smell.

  Carter had snagged a couple of handfuls of dried-up, late-summer blackberries from a bush on the edge of the meadow, and now he made small piles of them, using the huge heart-shaped leaves of a Catawba tree as plates.

  Grayson crossed back to the fire and sat down beside his brother on a log that formed a perfect bench.

  “It’s so dark out there. And it’ll get cold. We’ve got a fire and something to eat and they’ve got…” His voice seemed to catch in his throat. When he continued, it was in a ragged whisper. “They must be so scared.”

  “We’ll find them tomorrow,” Carter said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “But if you don’t eat something, you won’t be in any shape to look.”

  He watched Grayson struggle to collect himself. After a moment or two, Grayson asked, “Is it done?”

  “Maybe. How would I know? You were the one who helped Ma in the kitchen.”

  The mention of their mother punched both men in the gut. She could be dying with neither of her sons there to tell her goodbye. Or already dead.

  The moment dragged out, then Carter seized the conversation and yanked it forcefully into the right here, right now.

  “I never tried to cook a chunk of deer meat over an open fire like a hot dog.”

  “Even raw, it’ll taste better than K rations. Well, some of them weren’t bad, but the ones with ham and eggs would have gagged a maggot. Didn’t cook them over a fire, though. We used C-4 explosives.”

  “To cook dinner?”

  “Yeah, we’d stretch it out into thin strands, then light the strands with a cigarette lighter. Burned hot and clean and didn’t make smoke for the gooks to sight in on.”