by J. D. Horn
Corinne rushed forward and reached through the bars. “This is madness,” she said, turning her gaze from Elijah, whose eyes refused to meet her own, to Bell, his deputy, and finally to Lucille, who had wedged herself into a corner, looking like her one hope in this entire mess was to be forgotten. Corinne spun back to the man she’d come to this hell to marry. “Elijah, tell them. You didn’t hurt anyone.”
Elijah shook his head and mumbled, “I didn’t. I didn’t hurt nobody.” Finally he raised his eyes off the floor and looked at her. “I didn’t.”
“Take a seat,” the deputy said and tried to strong-arm her into a chair.
Corinne flung him off. “Do not touch me.” The deputy’s face blanched, and he took a quick pair of steps back. That’s right, tough guy, Corinne thought. To her surprise Lucille had joined her at her side.
“Please, ma’am. This won’t help anyone.” Lucille said.
Corinne felt her heart tumble into the pit of her stomach. Something in Lucille’s expression, the way her brow rested low over her downward shifting eyes, the calm acceptance in her voice, spoke of a hopeless resolution. “Once they made up their mind . . .” Lucille began to whisper, but then her words faded away under Bell’s withering glance. Corinne scowled back at Sheriff Bell, who seemed nearly varnished by satisfaction. He had already tried and convicted Elijah. Lucille gave her arm a gentle tug. “Please, you’ll just make it worse for him and yourself.”
A stunned-looking Elijah drifted back in the cell until he bumped up against the metal frame of a cot on its back wall. His knees buckled, and he collapsed, taking a seat on the thin mattress as the frame that held it squeaked.
“Where are they?” Bell said, advancing on the cell. Elijah sat still, staring blankly at the floor beneath his feet. Bell pulled his baton from his belt and banged it against the bars.
Elijah jolted to attention. “Who?” He licked his lips and squeezed the bed frame until his knuckles went white, like he was trying to grab ahold of the real world and pull himself back from this nightmare that his life had become.
“The Sleiger boys,” Bell said, and punctuated his words with another strike against the bars. “What have you done with them?” he said before the metal stopped ringing.
“I don’t know . . .” Elijah began.
“The Sleiger boys?” Lucille asked, releasing her hold on Corinne and stepping a foot or so closer to the sheriff. “They were just at the Judge’s house.”
“That’s right,” Corinne said, feeling a shimmer of hope rise within her. “The mortuary sent them to pick up the Judge’s body.”
“Them Sleigers ain’t got nothing to do with the funeral home,” the deputy said, his eyes widening, and his hand clutching his holster as if for reassurance.
Bell tossed a look of disdain at his deputy, then turned back to Elijah. “Okay, boy,” Bell said as he returned the baton to a loop in his belt. “How about you tell me what’s been going on around here, all nice and slow and honest like?”
“I don’t know,” Elijah stammered. “It don’t make no kind of sense.” His gaze lost focus as he seemed to consider all the possible explanations. A few moments passed, then his eyes darted up and locked on Bell’s.
Bell leaned back a bit and crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay, let’s start with you telling me why you killed your folks.”
Elijah jumped up from the cot and lunged toward the bars, grasping them so tightly his knuckles began to whiten. “I done told you, I ain’t killed nobody. My ma . . .” His words died out. He looked to Corinne. “That gun you brought with you.” His face flushed red as his tears begin to fall. “My pa. He said things. Bad things. She shot him. She shot herself.”
The sheriff spat on the floor and drew closer to the cell. “You expect me to believe a fine woman like your mama would do something like that? Hell, boy.” He turned and walked back toward his desk, stopping before it and hooking the keys to his belt. He turned back to face Elijah. “If your mama did the killing, you tell me why you tried to hide that gun.”
“I didn’t hide anything. Honest, I don’t even know where it is.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. We got it,” Bell said. “We found it in the yard with the miss’s clothes and case.”
Elijah’s forehead creased, then his eyes drifted down as if he were trying to remember. He focused on Corinne. “Yeah. I was going to bring you your things. I was going to take you away from here.”
“So your intent was to flee.”
Corinne rolled her eyes. “Sheriff, I would hardly say that leaving the gun lying in the middle of the yard for all to see constitutes ‘hiding.’ And as for being a fugitive, he doesn’t seem to have put much effort into escaping. Where did you find him, parked in the Dunnes’ driveway?”
Bell flashed her an angry look and pointed his index finger at her. “Maybe you need to simmer down, little lady. If I felt like listening to a hysterical woman, I’d call my wife.”
Little lady, indeed. She was not going to be silenced by this mustachioed ape, especially with Elijah’s life on the line. “Listen. I have no idea what happened at the Dunnes’, but you want to work your way to the bottom of things, I suggest you figure out what the Sleigers”—she cast a glance at Lucille to confirm the name, Lucille nodding her assent—“. . . what the Sleigers are up to. Why they’ve been hiding out. And why they’d take the Judge’s body, because I bet if you’d take the time to ring the mortuary, his remains are not there.” The sheriff ran his hand over his mustache. He was finally listening, so Corinne continued. “They are up to something strange, and it looks like they’re trying to implicate Elijah.” She stopped in midthought as a new realization struck her. “McAvoy. He never arrived to look after the Judge. Could these Sleigers have done something to him as well?”
“But by Elijah’s own account, they didn’t have anything to do with his parents’ deaths. As for Dowd and the others, what motive would they have?”
“Besides, I’ve known the Sleigers for forever,” the deputy said. “They ain’t killers.”
“You’ve known me forever, too, Fred,” Elijah snapped, the desperation of a cornered man biting through his words. “Am I a killer?”
“Under the right—or wrong—circumstances, I think we’re all killers,” Bell said. He didn’t seem ready to entertain even the slightest inkling that the man he had arrested could be innocent, even if the real killers were delivered gagged and bound at his feet. Corinne wondered if it was his pride keeping him entrenched in such certainty, or if he was just too intellectually lazy to care about uncovering the truth.
“I’m just saying the Sleigers sure ain’t criminal masterminds,” the deputy said. Bell shot him a sharp glance, and the deputy lowered his head and slinked away, taking a seat at one of the office’s two desks.
They all turned in unison as both of the double doors eased open to reveal the black emptiness of night. There was no movement beyond the doors, no wind to have opened them or kept them in that splayed position. Corinne took a step forward, intending to investigate.
“You just wait right there, Miss,” Bell commanded. The authority in his voice caused her military response to kick in; she obeyed the direct order.
The sheriff’s right hand slid down to his holster. “Rigby,” he said in a calm voice, and motioned with his left hand, his pointer and middle finger extended toward the door. The deputy shook his head as if he didn’t understand, but Corinne intuited it was sheer cowardice that kept him from rising. Bell’s face flushed and his eyes rounded beneath raised brows. He motioned once more toward the open doors, this time removing the gun from his holster as he did so. Corinne couldn’t tell if he did it to indicate he would cover the deputy, or if he was threatening to shoot Rigby if he didn’t obey. The look in the deputy’s pleading eyes told Corinne that she wasn’t the only one having trouble making the distinction.
Rigby’s chair squeaked as he stood, the sole sound in the peculiar silence that had descended upon the room. The deputy nearly tripped
over his own dragging feet, recovering just before toppling over, and made a few slow and furtive steps toward the doors. Then he stopped and pulled his pistol from his holster, craning his neck in an attempt to peer through the darkness, even though he was only a yard or so from the position where he’d started.
“Rigby.” Bell’s voice spurred the deputy into taking a few more steps. But he punctuated each step by casting a glance over his shoulder at the sheriff, each pause a question as to whether he had gone far enough. Corinne didn’t know whether to feel sympathy or disgust when she saw the way the man’s hand trembled around his gun.
“Enough,” Corinne said, although she wasn’t sure if she’d actually voiced the word. She stepped forward, relieving the deputy of his weapon as she pushed past him. She strode toward the opening and looked out. Nothing. She took a step out onto the landing. “Corinne,” she heard Elijah’s voice call out to her. “Come back.” He was frightened for her. She was not. The only fearful thing in this moment was the thought of leaving the group’s safety in the hands of men like Bell and Rigby.
The doors were open so wide there was no room for anyone to hide behind them, and even if there had been, the panes on their upper halves would have revealed anyone over three feet tall. Still, she tugged on the handle of the one on her left. The door resisted at first, but a moment later it shut with a loud clack.
“There’s nothing,” she called, her nose turning up at the cloying scent of the pulp factory. She was about to reach out and close the second door when she noticed a bank of fog, the thickest and most pungent she’d ever witnessed, begin to coalesce and draw near. She stepped back over the threshold, the heavy night air pressing up against her. Underneath the skunky scent of pulpwood rode another smell. Sweet. Woody, but with a chemical undertone. She had smelled the odor earlier in the Judge’s room.
At the bank’s edge, she discerned an animal movement. Her eyes had adjusted enough to the dark to make out a canine form lurking at the edge of the miasma, almost like it was herding the fog to the station’s steps.
Sensing movement behind her, she looked back over her shoulder. Rigby and Bell had joined her at the entrance, Rigby having regained enough confidence to step out from behind her skirt. The sheriff holstered his gun, and then reached out and relieved her of the deputy’s pistol.
At the edge of the fog, the hulking beast drew close enough for those gathered just outside the station’s doorway to make out its brindle markings. “Isn’t that . . .” she began.
“Tac, is that you?” Rigby called out, taking a few steps out toward the dog. “Sheriff, ain’t that Charlie’s dog, Tac?” Rigby squatted on his haunches. “Come ’ere, girl.” The dog padded forward. “Where’s Toe, girl? Where’s your brother?”
“I ate him.” The words came from the dog’s mouth seconds before it lunged at the deputy, dragging him off behind the veil of fog. From his screams, Corinne could tell he was being dragged across the road and beyond the field; then the sound ceased abruptly. The sheriff shot wildly and indiscriminately into the fog, emptying his gun’s chambers. There was no sign that any of his bullets met their mark.
Faces began to appear through the mist. “Who are these people?” she asked Bell without taking her eyes off the arrivals. “These people,” she had said, because their forms appeared human, even though her instincts cried out that they were something else entirely. Many of them appeared to be limp puppets, incapable of ambulation under their own steam, and dragged along all the same by some kind of invisible strings. A few seemed to be more their own masters, standing taller and moving with more grace, but there was still something wrong with them. It was their eyes. They glowed blue like gas flames. All carried an assortment of pipes and pans, garbage can lids, sticks, which they began to sound and clack and clang in unison. Small fires began to sprout up among them, bobbing up and down in the distance. “Are those torches? Actual torches?” No sooner had the words escaped her than an odd cacophony began—car horns and clanging pipes, breaking glass. “Sheriff, what is this?” she asked, daring to look away from the spectacle before her to see the cross of confusion and concern that had spread over his face.
“Tell me. Were you and Elijah supposed to marry today?”
It seemed impossible, but it was true. “Yes.”
“Then this here, this commotion,” he said without taking his eyes off the growing crowd, “is shivaree. And I think they’re coming for your Elijah.”
“What?”
“You need to get back inside,” he said, unhooking the keys to the cell from his belt loop and passing them to her. “Do your best to get Lucille and Elijah away from here. When you find a phone, you call the state patrol. You hear me?” He reached down and pulled his pistol from its holster. “I take it you know how to use one of these?” He held the gun out to her.
“Yes, but . . .”
“Good God, woman. For once in your life will you just do as you are told?”
Corinne shifted the heavy ring of keys to her left hand and tightened her grasp, taking the gun in her right hand. She tossed one last quick look at those who had gathered in the fog. They formed an advancing arc. Although she couldn’t see them, the way the noises carried and echoed told her that there were others behind the building as well. The ones she could see walked in a type of lockstep, stopping and advancing as if controlled by a single mind. Corinne gathered from their actions that she stood inside a constricting circle of which the jail served as the center point. She began to turn away and follow the sheriff’s orders when she heard him call out.
“Frank, boy,” the sheriff called, his voice coming out strained, high. “Mason? That you? What the hell happened to you, boy?” Frank Mason pushed forward to the front of the crowd. He moved awkwardly, lurching forward like he was being yanked along against his will. “I don’t know what you think y’all are up to, but you need to get out of here. Get all these folk out of here.”
As Corinne stood focused on Frank, a blur—a rush of wind—gyrated before her, then Bell, too, disappeared into the night. This time Corinne heard no cry, no wail, only a woman’s familiar laughter riding on a wave of the shivaree.
FIFTY-TWO
Corinne stumbled backward through the door, slamming it shut behind her. Lucille met her there and shoved the bolt in, locking the door into place. Their eyes met. Bolting the door was a hollow gesture, and both of them knew it. Corinne found herself cursing the station’s builders once again.
“What is wrong with this place? What is wrong with these people?” Corrine said, not really expecting an answer.
“It’s Mississippi,” Lucille responded all the same.
Corinne slid to the side of the window to see if she could spot the sheriff among the shuffling crowd. “It looks like the entire town has gone mad.” She turned back to Lucille and Elijah. “We have to get out of here.”
She sped to Elijah’s cell, fumbling through what seemed to be an infinite collection of nonfitting keys. The noise continued growing louder. Corinne knew the circle was tightening. A heavy stone shattered one of the windows, then all fell silent except for the sound of a woman’s laughter.
“Ruby.” Elijah’s voice reached out to her from behind the bars. He stood there, whiter than the fog itself, his hands clutched around the bars that held him. “I’d know her laugh anywhere.”
“That is not possible,” Corinne protested aloud. “It isn’t,” she repeated, but this time silently. She continued to work through the keys; finally one she must have tried a hundred times already slid into place.
“They closed her in a casket,” Elijah mumbled to himself. “Buried her with her mama.”
“And yet she’s still out there,” Lucille said, fixing them both in her terrified gaze. “She’s taken the rest of them. Everybody who done her wrong. And now she’s gonna come for us.”
Corrine focused on the task at hand, turning the key until the lock clanked. She grasped the bars and swung the door open, but Elijah didn’t move.<
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“Why, Lucille, you know I wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.”
Corinne turned back to the entrance. The door, in spite of having been locked, had slid silently open.
“Sweet Jesus!” Lucille exclaimed and fell back as Ruby floated in on a cloud of roiling fog. Until now, Corinne had never believed in magic or monsters, but all that had changed in an instant.
“You were like a mother to me,” Ruby continued as her feet lowered to the floor, making light contact. “You, on the other hand,” she said, approaching Corinne and tracing a cold finger along her cheek, then her jawline. “I’m afraid the Dunnes’ little tiff done ruined my special surprise for you. You two were supposed to be married by now. We were coming to serenade you outside your bridal chambers. Interrupt in the moments before you surrendered your precious maidenhead.” She laughed and feigned a wide-eyed surprise. “Or could it be you aren’t intact?” Her nose wrinkled up as she shook her head. “Naughty, naughty girl.
“I was gonna kill you,” she said smiling, her lip curling back to show an unnaturally sharp pair of canines. “Oh, yes, I was.” The words poured forth with a touch of glee. “But you done made me like you, what with the way you came stomping out there all on your own while the menfolk were in here pissing themselves. I think I might find a better use for you, darlin’.” She threw back her head and let loose a laugh that caused Corinne’s blood to run cold. Corinne shuddered as she noticed the blueness of the skin that stretched across Ruby’s otherwise lovely throat.
The weight of the gun in Corinne’s hand reminded her of its presence. Her hand ached to raise the pistol; her finger twitched at the thought of squeezing its trigger. Ruby’s blue flame eyes shot at her, all mirth gone from them. “I wouldn’t even think it,” she said, and then the gun fell from Corinne’s grasp. Ruby pinned her with her gaze. “And there went your last chance to for us to be friends.”
“Ruby,” Elijah called, causing this beautiful yet unholy creature to turn away. “How can it be?”