by Ninie Hammon
“You’ve been set up. You know that, don’t you? Both of you have been set up.”
Sarabeth raised her head and stared at him.
“Say you want to get the newspaper off your back. Name me a better way to do it than to discredit the editor, make everything she says suspect. And how could you do that?”
“Get her brother arrested on marijuana charges.” Sarabeth said in dawning understanding. Of course! “It’s Bubba Jamison, isn’t it. Somehow, he used Jake to set us up.”
Sonny nodded, his lips pressed tight together.
“Makes sense to me,” Detective Hayes said.
Sarabeth felt that airy hole open up in her belly again and she sucked in a little gasp. But then the hole closed back up all on its own. Rage had slammed the door shut on it. If Bubba Jamison thought he could scare her into submission, believed he could intimidate the press …
“Ben’s not going to prison!” She ground the words out through clenched teeth. “That monster in a human being suit is not going to get away with it. He’s not going to bully me or my brother … or my newspaper!”
Sonny looked at her and almost smiled. “You sound just like your father,” he said.
Chapter 19
Some days, Jennifer Jamison just cried. She certainly had every reason to cry, but that didn’t have anything to do with why she did it. Crying just happened to her, like rain happened to you every now and then if you stood outside long enough. You couldn’t stop the rain. You just had to stand there and get wet until an invisible wind blew the clouds away.
She woke up the morning after the back-to-school cabin party and crying happened. She cried for hours, went from whimpering to great, heaving sobs, until she was limp and all her muscles ached and the only thing in the world she wanted was to stop crying.
That’s how Jake found her when he came home after he’d gotten his best friend arrested. He could hear her sobbing through the closed door of her room.
He’d never had a close relationship with his sister and he’d studied Ben and Sarabeth the way you wallow an equation around in your head, not just looking for the answer but trying to figure out how to work the problem. He sat with them on their front porch in the evenings as they talked—about MC Hammer and whether rap really was music. About love and honor and God, how to keep raspberries from turning muffin batter pink, and what it meant to stand up for what you believed in. He watched them chuck pieces of popcorn at each other during Cheers and The Cosby Show, saw Ben tiptoe into his sister’s darkened room with hot tea and dry toast on a tray when she had one of her headaches.
But no matter how hard he tried, there was no way Jake could interpret that kind of relationship in the context of his world. Jennifer was weird, with a desperate, wild look in her eyes most of the time that was just plain creepy.
Jake wanted to ignore his sister’s tears. He had enough to think about. But he had already bailed on one person in his life today; he couldn’t bail on another.
She was lying on the bed with her back to him and didn’t hear him knock.
“Jennifer?”
His voice startled her and she leapt to her feet with that cornered-animal look in her eyes. When she saw it was Jake, she sank back down on the bed.
“What do you want?”
“Are you all right?”
She stopped sniffling and looked at him.
“Why in the world would you care if I’m all right?”
That hurt.
“You were crying, and I just wondered—”
“Wondered what? Wondered if something was wrong? Oh, please.”
She picked up a t-shirt off the bed to dry her face, her tears reduced to hiccupping sniffles, the hangover of a severe crying jag.
“Excuse me for asking. You’re obviously having a great time. I’m sorry I crashed your party.”
He turned to go and she blurted out two words.
“I’m pregnant.”
Jake froze. Then he turned slowly back around. When he lashed out at her, she almost seemed relieved, like he’d confirmed her view of the nature of reality.
“You’re pregnant! Do you have any idea how many guys I’ve decked over the years for making filthy remarks about you?”
Jennifer studied him like she was looking at an ant farm.
“Who’s the father?”
“Oh, I have no idea. But I’d say it’s a safe bet you owe an apology to just about every male human being in the county above the age of puberty. I got to as many of them as I could.”
Jake stepped back, stunned. “You’ve been … you were trying … ?” His mind wouldn’t go there. “Why?”
Between one heartbeat and the next, Jennifer went from serene to wild-eyed, shrieking rage.
“Daddy!” Her fury clothed his name in a thousand layers of loathing. “As soon as I was old enough to know what the word slut meant, that’s what I wanted to be. Because Daddy hated it! Called Mama a slut over and over again … while he was strangling her.”
Jennifer’s words hit Jake in the chest like a wrecking ball.
“What?”
“You heard me! I said Daddy killed Mama.” Her voice sounded like a wild animal, a cheetah or a cougar, with its paw caught in a trap. “I saw him. He put his big hands around her neck, held her out with her feet dangling above the floor and choked her to death.”
Her voice changed abruptly and she became a little girl, narrating the scene playing on the movie screen of her memory.
“Mommy cried. She said, ‘No, I didn’t! It’s not true!’” Jennifer shook her head back and forth, her wide eyes staring into empty space. “She begged, fought him, but he wouldn’t let go, just kept squeezing her neck. Squeezing and squeezing until she hung there limp as a doll.”
Jake gaped at his sister, his mind scrambling to process. Nothing made any sense and suddenly everything made perfect sense, both at the same time.
“And he’d kill me, too,” she said in the scared-little-girl voice, “if he knew I was a slut like Mommy.”
As quickly as Jennifer had become a cowering child, her terror was transformed into rage again.
“But he’s not going to find out! I’m going to get rid of it long before there’s anything for Daddy to see. He’s not going to do to me what he did to Mama!”
Jake was stupefied. He took a step toward her, reached out. “Jennifer, I—”
She turned on him. “Get out of here!” The power of her wrath stopped him in his tracks. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be all sweet and snuggly and worried about me? Where have you been my whole life?”
She leapt off the bed, shoved him backward into the hallway and banged the door shut in his face.
Jake stood rooted to the spot for a few seconds, then he turned and staggered toward the bathroom. He barely made it before he threw up.
• • • • •
The pull-off from KY 44 about half way between Brewster and Hoperton was a little hard to find unless you knew what to look for, knew it was the first turn into the woods after the vandalized, torn-in-half road sign that promised “Hope” was only nine miles farther down the road.
Jennifer always sneered when she passed that sign.
A two-tire track led through the trees for a quarter of a mile and then out to a sandbar formed by a large loop in the Rolling Fork River. There was a rock embankment on the other side and the river had chiseled out a deep cleft beneath it 50 feet wide and 70 feet long where the water flowed dark, smooth and deep. Old Joe’s Hole.
The spot was a favorite hangout for teenagers on the weekend. Beer bottles, soft drink cans, and the other assorted flotsam and jetsam of picnics and parties littered a riverbank freckled with charred circles where kids had made fires to cook hot dogs or roast marsh-mallows for S’mores.
Though Old Joe’s Hole was a densely populated piece of teenage real estate Friday night through Sunday, it was as silent and empty as a tomb at just after dawn on Monday morning. That’s why Jennifer Jamison had se
lected this spot. She drove Bubba’s black Ford Bronco across the smooth sand to the river’s edge so she could look both ways down the Rolling Fork, where the morning mist floated like tattered lace on the water.
She put the truck into park, turned off the ignition and it was quiet. All you could hear was the river sound, not rapids, just moving water that sang a soft, soothing melody. The wind tiptoed through the leaves in the trees and a solitary lark chirped in a nearby dogwood.
Jennifer turned to Kelsey. “You like this place?”
“Yeah, it’s nice.”
Kelsey had said little after Jennifer picked her up in the pre-dawn dark on the side of the road down from the drive leading to her parents’ “estate.” Just told Jennifer that she’d stuffed a couple of pillows under the covers in her bed and stopped briefly to look in on Bethany before she sneaked out the back door.
She’d told her father before she went to bed that she didn’t want to go on the class field trip the next morning, that she wanted to sleep in, so it would be hours before anybody missed her. She said it was entirely possible, in fact, that they might never notice she was gone at all.
Jennifer knew for lead pipe certain she’d be missed! Soon as Daddy realized she’d taken his truck, the fire of his rage would light up the sky like the explosion of the Challenger.
“I like this place because the flowers smell so good here,” Jennifer said.
Kelsey glanced at the rolled-up windows on the truck and surveyed the riverbank. “There aren’t any flowers here. And even if there were, you couldn’t—”
“You don’t smell them?” Jennifer’s was the voice of a small, frightened child.
“I … I can’t smell anything. I’ve got a cold.”
Jennifer leaned past Kelsey, opened the glove box and took out the .22 pistol. She knew nothing about firearms, had merely grabbed the easiest one of Daddy’s guns to steal. She’d watched enough television to figure out that it was loaded.
She placed the pistol on the dash board, reached into the Brewster Market sack at Kelsey’s feet, pulled out two beers and handed one to Kelsey.
“You want something stronger, I got it. There’s—”
“No, thank you.”
“No thank you? Do you think I invited you out here to some kind of garden party—white gloves and mint juleps?”
Jennifer unscrewed the cap on the beer bottle and chugged half of it down in one long gulp. “I’m checking out. You don’t want to go, that’s fine and dandy with me. Nobody’s twisting your arm, Sweetheart.”
When Kelsey still didn’t respond, Jennifer screamed at her. “Say something! Or you can haul your fuzzy butt out of my truck and go home!”
“No! I’m not gonna go home. Ever.”
“Then what is your problem?”
“What do you want from me?” Now Kelsey was screaming. “What do you want me to do? To say? I don’t know how I’m supposed to act. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
It took a couple of seconds for the words to register, then they both burst out laughing.
“Neither have I, baby sister,” Jennifer chuckled. “We’ll just have to figure it out as we go along.”
She took another big swig of beer and motioned for Kelsey to take a drink. Kelsey turned her beer up and chugged three or four swallows, let out a very impolite burp and fixed her electric blue eyes on Jennifer.
“The problem is, I’m scared,” she said, then quickly rushed on. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it. I do.” She spoke the next words softly with an intensity that shouted. “I want them to see how it feels to have a hole in the pit of your stomach so big you can’t eat, or swallow or even stand up straight.” The rage-fueled energy left her voice and the flat, lifelessness returned. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just, I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can actually pull the trigger.”
Jennifer studied the pale blond girl sitting next to her. Without the heavy makeup she always wore, the black eyeliner and thick mascara, Kelsey looked pure and innocent, like an angel. It didn’t matter how perfect she looked on the outside, of course. All that mattered was what lay on the inside, and sometimes Jennifer could see that, could look into people. She never looked directly into her father’s eyes, because when she did, she could see the rot inside him, worms, maggots, hairy-legged spiders and dung beetles in a writhing, tangled pile.
She tried to look into Kelsey now, but she couldn’t see anything. Maybe that was it, though. Maybe she was seeing into Kelsey and there just wasn’t anything inside her to see.
“Do you want me to do it? Do you want me to pull the trigger for you?”
Kelsey stared into Jennifer’s pale green eyes for a long time. A lifetime of communication passed between them in that look. Then she nodded her head slowly.
Jennifer turned, stared out at the river and inhaled deeply. “I love the smell of flowers.” Then she turned back to Kelsey. “Ok, let’s do what we came here to do.”
She lifted the beer to her lips and finished most of it, then with an odd little smile slowly poured the rest of the beer out on the seat. She dropped the beer bottle in the floor and picked up the gun off the dashboard. She’d never fired a gun before.
“Will it hurt?”
“I don’t think so. How could it? And even if it does, it won’t hurt for long.”
“You think there’s a God?”
“There couldn’t be.” Jennifer’s voice was tired, defeated. “It’s just over.” She pulled the hammer back with her thumb—she’d seen that on cowboy movies—until it clicked. “You ready?”
There was a wild, panicked look in Kelsey’s eyes for a moment. Then it was gone and something like peace took its place. “Yeah, I’m ready.” Her voice was determined and strong, then it faltered and she sounded like a little kid who didn’t want to see the vaccination needle. “But I can’t look.”
She wadded her hands up into fists in her lap, held her breath, tensed and squeezed her eyes shut. “Just do it!”
Jennifer put the gun to Kelsey’s temple and pulled the trigger.
The shot reverberated like a cannon in the truck cab. When the cold gun barrel touched her skin, Kelsey instinctively pulled away, jerked her head, and the force of the bullet knocked her the direction she was already falling, sideways into the door. Then her limp body collapsed forward, slid down into the floorboard on her knees. Like she was praying.
Jennifer was surprised there was so little blood, and mildly disappointed. That’s why she’d taken her father’s truck. She wanted him to have to clean up the mess of her death, and she intended to make a big one! She cocked the gun again and felt a grand rush of triumph.
One more breath.
She sucked in the sweet scent of flowers and thought about her mother.
“I’m free now, Mommy,” she whispered in a ragged half sob. “Just like you.” Then she put the gun barrel up to the side of her neck, tight against the carotid artery she’d learned about in health class, and pulled the trigger.
The second bang startled the lark that had been chirping in a nearby dogwood tree and it fluttered away. Then the silence was broken only by a gurgling, gasping noise coming from the truck cab that went on for three or four minutes. When it finally stopped, there was no sound but the quiet rush of the river.
Chapter 20
Seth sat behind the big cherry desk in his office at Double Springs. It was just after seven o’clock; he’d been up since four. He always came in before everybody else, particularly on a Monday morning, got half a day’s work done before the rest of the staff showed up.
There was no reason to come in early today though. A crack in the gigantic cypress vat that held “distiller’s beer” on its way to becoming Double Springs bourbon had shut the whole operation down Friday afternoon. Seth had given his whole staff a week off. It would take at least that long to replace the vat.
But he’d still shown up early this morning, turned his rescue squad pager off, determined
to get some work done. It wasn’t happening, though. He’d done absolutely nothing since he sat down in his big, high-backed chair but stare at the whiskey bottle covered with chicken feathers that sat by his phone, and think about Sarabeth.
Seth had heard about Ben’s arrest. It was big news; the brother of the crusading newspaper editor busted in a marijuana barn. That was rich!
What in the world had that boy been thinking! He might as well have written on his chest in black Magic Marker: “Send me to prison forever!” Sarabeth must be scared to death. He ached to call her.
He reflexively followed that painful tug of emotion, sucked on a single strand of spaghetti and quickly pulled up short in front of the whole, tangled pile.
Fiddle-dee foo!
That’s what Granny Walker would have said. She’d have crossed her skinny arms across her flat chest, cocked her head to one side and spit out the plain truth—reality in long johns with the butt flap down.
“You’re sweet on that gal ain’t ya … well, ain’t ya?” That’s what she’d have said. And he’d have replied that every time he tried to get close to the beautiful red-head, she pushed him away. Still, the truth was—
The phone rang and Seth jumped, hoping against all reason it might be Sarabeth. The caller was John Cassidy, a whiskey distributor in Tulsa who had known Seth’s father.
“John? What in the world are you doing up at this hour? Are the chickens even awake in Oklahoma?”
“Funny, McAllister, very funny. I like to get in early to get a jump on the day, that’s all. I was going to leave you a message, but since you’re there … just looked at the orders for Double Springs that came in last week. What have you been doing, my friend? They’re near double what they were six months ago.”
What had he been doing? Work. Just roll-your-sleeves-up, hard work. That’s all he had done for … for more than a year now. Had it been that long? Had he actually done nothing but work—18, 20 hours a day—for a whole year?
“This much volume, I need a shipment by mid-week. You handle that?”