by Ninie Hammon
“Consider it done, John. We’re not bottling, leak in the cypress vat, but we’re shipping. I’ll see to it there’s a truck leaving Callison County headed your way by noon today.”
“Callison County? That’s where Double Springs is, in Callison County, Kentucky?”
“Well, it says Brewster on the label, but Brewster’s in Callison County. Why?”
“Nothing, just that’s the second time I’ve heard of Callison County, Kentucky in the last 24 hours.”
“To what does my fair homeland owe its notoriety? Didn’t have anything to do with moonshine, did it? That or the Derby are Kentucky’s chief claims to fame—and the Louisville Slugger. But we don’t have horses or baseball bats in Callison County.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with moonshine, but it was just as illegal.”
“Marijuana.” There was no expression whatsoever in Seth’s voice.
“Yep, dope. Joe never told me he ran a distillery in the marijuana-growing capital of North America.”
Seth felt sick. “How did you hear about dope-growing in Callison County all the way out there on the prairie?”
“The dope I’m talking about wasn’t growing in Callison County. It was growing here.”
“You lost me, John.”
“Oh, you hear now and then about somebody getting busted for growing dope here. Some guy raising it to sell to his friends, college kids growing some out behind the dorm. Just small-time stuff. Until last week. It was all over the news.”
Cassidy’s brother, a deputy sheriff in Muskogee County, southeast of Tulsa, had told him all about it.
“I know you’re not going to believe this, Seth, but he said they found a barn that had apparently been completely full of dope, full of it! The whole barn, can you imagine that!
Seth didn’t have any trouble at all imagining that, but he kept his mouth shut, just listened.
“This guy who lived down around Lawton rented the farm out. He called to tell the man who’d rented it that he was coming by to pick up a plow head he’d left in the barn, and when he showed up, the place was empty. Nobody in the house, and pieces of dry marijuana plants all over the barn. Checked the field and looks like they must have grown a couple of acres of it!”
“Thanks so much for the entertaining Story Hour with John Cassidy,” Seth laughed. “But I fail to see what any of this has to do with Callison County.”
“Just this, my brother was telling me that when they were going through the house, they found a year-old newspaper that the dope growers left behind. It was a copy of the Callison County Times or Tribune or something like that. Had this story about how dopers—that’s what the story called them, dopers—had just about taken over the whole county. Talked about farmers making a fortune who never worked, and hung juries, dogs with their throats cut—I didn’t get that part—and police helicopters looking for a particular shade of—”
“Marijuana green. I remember the story.”
“I’m just saying, maybe one of your dopers decided to come out here to grow his crop.” He laughed. “Can’t say I blame him. Farmland in Oklahoma’s way better than anything you’ve got in Kentucky.”
Seth hung up the phone and shook his head.
There’d been a time when the dopers could grow marijuana by the acre in Callison County, too. He remembered reading about the busts, but that was years ago. Now, it was a few plants here, and a few there, high-octane, super dope that sold by the ounce like gold.
He glanced out the window at the bright sparkle of dew on the begonias that lined the walkway outside his office.
What if some enterprising Callison County doper had decided to grow super-dope someplace else, somewhere the cops wouldn’t give him such a hard time? How much money could you make on an acre of sensemilla? Shoot, maybe they’d all figure out they could make more money raising it somewhere else. Callison County certainly had enough know-how and expertise to export all over America. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t just be Sarabeth railing about dopers in the newspaper. It would … make national headlines.
Seth froze. The day Sarabeth had come to Double Springs, she’d talked about her father. Now he heard her speak inside his head as clearly as if she were sitting beside him. “The last time I heard my father’s voice, he sounded so alive. He said he was working on an important story that would make national headlines.”
Could this have been Jim Bingham’s big story? Maybe it wasn’t just some random Callison County doper growing pot in Oklahoma. Maybe some local doper really had decided to expand his empire outside the county. Outside the state. What if Jim Bingham had figured that out? Sarabeth had described Joe Fogerty’s death-bed statement in her story about his capture. The old drunk hadn’t killed Jim Bingham … so maybe somebody murdered the editor of the newspaper to shut him up.
Seth’s heart began to pound. He squeezed the arm rests on his chair, clamped down tight with both hands in an effort to grab hold of his racing emotions. If Granny Walker had told him once, she’d told him a thousand times, “Now Seth-boy, one robin don’t make it spring.”
All Seth had was one robin, a lone feathered creature that might, in reality, turn out to be nothing more than a sparrow or a crow. And even if there were, indeed, a whole flock of robins out there somewhere, how could anybody possibly find it?
Well, he’d found the first bird, hadn’t he? And Double Springs had half a dozen to a dozen distributors in every state.
I can’t call them all!
Why not? His WATS line had no limit on the number of long distance calls he could make. And with the distillery shut down for a week, he certainly had the time.
But what were the odds that he could find somebody who just happened to know, oh by the way, if the police in that particular community just happened to find acres of marijuana growing out in a field somewhere—that just happened to be rented to somebody from Callison County, Kentucky?
This is crazy. Certifiably crazy!
He picked up the phone and dialed his assistant’s extension.
“Martha, I gave you a week off, but I know you’re checking your messages. You always do. Daddy left you a message once on Christmas Day and you called him back five minutes later. So call me. I’m in the office. I need you to tell me where you keep the complete list of the names and phone numbers of Double Springs’ distributors, every one of them, anywhere in America. I have most of it, but I don’t want to miss anybody. And no, I’m not going to tell you why I want it. Don’t ask.”
He started to hang up, then added, “And don’t you dare come into the office to find it for me! Just call and tell me where to look.” He began flipping through the A section of his Roll-A-Dex, looking for the names of distributors in predominantly agricultural areas—nothing in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia. He was looking for people in the Eastern Time Zone, who might be awake.
• • • • •
Not so much as a pin prick of light shown in the black ditch of absolute darkness that shrouded Kelsey Reynolds, like there’d been a power failure in the universe.
She was on her knees, slumped sideways against a wall. When she tried to straighten up, the motion shoved an agonizing ice pick of pain into her head. She gasped and stopped moving, concentrated on breathing.
Where was she and why was it so dark here?
There was something fabric against her back, something smooth and cold, like metal, in front of her. On the right, there was a handle or lever on the wall. She grasped it, used it to try to pull herself up off her knees and—
Without warning, the wall moved and she was falling. Before she could cry out, she landed on something soft—sand, cool sand, pebbles and rocks. She rolled over carefully from her side to her back. She could feel warmth on her face and a cool breeze, and she could hear birds singing and another sound, a rushing sound, water maybe.
“Hello,” she said quietly, just as a test, and she could hear it, so she wasn’t dreaming. She struggled to think but her head hurt so bad
it made her sick. She lifted the heels of both hands up to massage her temples where the headache pain throbbed, and there was something sticky all over her face.
Why was she lying in the sand in the dark with sticky stuff on her face?
All at once, her slowly dawning awareness was out-distanced by a faster growing terror. In a lightning bolt of realization she grasped that the darkness all around her was not just the absence of light. It wasn’t a negative “not-light.” It was a positive, a real thing, an entity.
It was Dark, brooding, malevolent and silent.
And Dark was a shape-changer. Like the berserkers of Norse mythology could transform themselves into bears and wolves, Dark could change into anything, everything or nothing at all. So Dark could become liquid and pour into her, through her ears and eyes and nose, and fill her up, drown her, put out all the lights, make her dark inside, dark and cold and dead.
“Mommy,” she whimpered. “Daddy! I’m scared.”
Kelsey started to cry quietly and the tiny shaking movement of her sniffles hammered in her temples and made her dizzy. Then even Dark went away, reality dissolved, and she floated off into nothingness.
When she came to again, she lay quiet, trying with all her strength to open her eyes! But it was like her eye-lids were nailed shut. She finally reached a trembling hand up to her face to see what was holding her eyes closed, but what she felt with her fingers made no sense. Her eyes were open! She could feel it, touch her eyeballs. But if her eyes were open, why was it so dark?
She rolled slowly over onto her stomach and pushed herself carefully up to her hands and knees. Then she lurched to her feet, sobbing, and somehow managed to stay upright. She staggered around, grasping at empty air, felt water on her foot and then lost her balance and fell face forward into the river. Struggling, disoriented, Kelsey tried to come up for air but which way was up? She tried to scream, but her mouth was full of water. She gasped and sucked in water with the air, choked, gagged and somehow managed to wail, “Help me, help!”
Two old fishermen in a johnboat heard her cry and saw Kelsey struggling to stand in the waist-deep water. They beached the boat and raced toward her.
The bald man, Buford, got to her first and tried to take her arm. “It’s not deep, you can stand up.” She lurched at him and almost knocked him down, grabbed hold of his arm and held on so tight she almost pulled him under.
Harry, Buford’s fishing buddy for 35 years, was a step behind and he took her other arm to get her out of the water. She was a little bitty thing, just a kid, looked like. He half lifted, half dragged her to the shore and collapsed on the sand with her.
“Don’t leave me, please!” Kelsey begged.
“Honey, we ain’t ’bout to leave you here all by yourself!” Harry tried to comfort her. “Everything’s gonna be just fine. Ain’t nothing gonna hurt you.”
Her long blond hair was wet and tangled, with blood in it around her face. Looked like she’d whacked both sides of her head on something and blood was oozing down over her ears. Not gushing; the wounds weren’t very big.
Buford had been standing nearby looking at her and he tapped Harry on the shoulder, pointed to his own eyes and then to hers, and mouthed she can’t see. Harry waved his hand in front of her face and she didn’t respond.
“Now Honey, I need to know your name and what happened to you, can you tell me that?” Harry asked, but the girl was incoherent, kept babbling about the dark coming to get her.
Buford cocked his head toward the black Ford Bronco parked next to the river with the passenger door open, Harry nodded and Buford turned and crunched down the riverbank toward the truck. That was obviously how the kid got here, but who drove her? She sure didn’t drive herself! So where was the driver and why’d he leave a blind girl here all by—
Buford suddenly hollered, a strangled cry of surprise and horror, stumbled backward from the open truck door, tripped and landed on his butt in the sand. He turned toward Harry; shock had drained all the color out of his face.
“There’s a girl in there! And blood, blood all over, blood everywhere.” He swallowed hard a couple of times to keep from throwing up. He hadn’t seen anything like that, or smelled the copper stench of so much blood, since he’d led a platoon of grunts into the jungle on Iwo Jima almost half a century ago. “She’s dead!”
“You sure?”
“Dang right I’m sure! I’m goin’ for help.”
Buford lurched to his feet and took off at something that approximated a run up the trail to the road to flag down a car. He wasn’t just running for help, though. He was running to get away from the truck and what he’d seen in it.
There was a bloody pistol in the lap of the girl slumped behind the steering wheel. With so much blood on her, he couldn’t tell where she’d been shot, but the thing was, the blood wasn’t just on the girl. It was everywhere—on the window beside her, on the steering wheel and the dashboard, on the seat and on the roof above her head. It wasn’t splattered blood. It was smeared blood. It’d been wiped on all those surfaces; you could see the hand prints plain as day. And not just smeared prints—words.
Buford fell, buggered up his knee, and staggered on, his mind reeling. The girl who’d been driving had shot herself and smeared blood all over the truck cab while she was dying. And then she’d written on the windshield in her own blood!
No, couldn’t be!
Buford kept on running.
Chapter 21
Harmony Pruitt called out from the front office, “I’m locking up now, Sarabeth, you sure you don’t need anything?”
“I’m sure, Harmony. Thanks. See you in the morning.”
She heard the door close and Harmony’s key in the lock and the sudden silence that followed was the first real quiet, the first chance to take a deep breath since …
Her mind jack-knifed like an 18-wheeler on a freeway, returned to a moment frozen in time—her fingers sticky with cake batter as she reached to open the front door. The last sane, good moment before her life had been dumped into a blender set for puree.
She actually moaned, and pushed her father’s—her!—leather chair back from the typewriter, leaned her head forward and tenderly massaged the back of her neck where the muscles were as taut as cables on a suspension bridge. She was tired, way the other side of exhausted.
The police scanner that lived on her mantle had started squalling before seven o’clock, exploding with calls. Police! Rescue squad! Ambulance! She’d been fully dressed, had finally dozed off on the couch just before sunrise, so she was like a fireman—into her shoes and out the door with her camera bag slung over her shoulder in less than a minute.
That’s how she’d managed to make it to the swimming hole in the Rolling Fork River before the ambulance had Kelsey loaded for transport. She shivered at the memory of the pale child lying on the stretcher—blind.
Sarabeth sighed and stopped rubbing her neck. Her fingers were getting sore and the muscles were still as hard as an anvil. And she couldn’t help waiting for the other shoe to drop. Would her fatigue make her legs go numb? Or stab a dagger into her ear? Or maybe … nothing at all. Maybe she’d get a pass from the MS slot machine this time.
Impulsively, she reached over, picked up the receiver off the phone on her desk and dialed her home number. Ben answered on the second ring. His voice sounded a little hoarse. Had he been crying?
“I just wanted to check in on you, see how you’re doing.”
“I didn’t say it last night, but I just want you to know—”
“Not now, Ben!” She hadn’t meant for it to come out harsh, but his instant silence told her she’d wounded him. “I’m on overload. Let’s not go there right now. There’ll be plenty of time later.”
“I understand.” He hesitated. “I don’t like dumping one more thing in your lap, but …”
“But what?” Her mouth went dry.
“Sarabeth, Jake’s gone. Nobody can find him. The sheriff called here to ask if I knew where h
e was, but I haven’t talked to him since—” The heartbeat of silence spoke volumes. “I mean, his sister’s dead! Killed herself, and Jake doesn’t even … nobody can find him to tell him.”
Sarabeth hadn’t been able to get her arms around how to feel about Jake yet. Ben was facing prison because Jake had … well, Jake had done something, was mixed up in it somehow. But she absolutely could not go there right now.
Ben’s voice was full of pain. “I just wish he didn’t have to hear it from his father, that he could find out some other way.”
Sarabeth had talked to the Kentucky State Police troopers who had driven out to Bubba’s house earlier that day to give him the news. They said he’d been as cold as a flagpole in a blizzard. They’d told him, straight out, what had happened. His daughter had been found dead in his truck on the riverbank at Old Joe’s Hole. She’d been shot, a self-inflicted wound.
Bubba’d taken a step backward, didn’t exactly stagger, but it looked like he’d been pushed. The corner of his mouth had twitched, but other than that, his expression never changed.
“You’re sure it’s my Jenny?”
They’d nodded.
“And she’s dead.” That wasn’t a question, but they’d nodded just the same. Then he told them he’d be in town later to make arrangements, actually thanked them. Before they made it back to their cruiser, they heard a crash from inside the house, like something huge, a china cabinet or a book case, had hit the floor. And they heard a cry come from the house, almost like a howl, that raised the hair on their arms.
Ben was right, Sarabeth thought. It’d be better for Jake to hear about it from somebody—anybody!—other than his father.
“Call me if you hear from him,” she told him. Then it occurred to her that if he chose not to call her, there was nothing she could do about it. She had no control over him anymore. Truth was, every parent’s sense of control over any child above the age of 6 months was illusory at best. “I mean it, Ben, call me! I want to help.”
“I’ll call.” And maybe he would.