Nowhere USA: The Complete Series: A Psychological Thriller series (Nowhere, USA)

by Ninie Hammon

  “Where’s Abby?”

  “Abby Clayton?”

  “Of course, Abby Clayton. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. She’s not here.”

  The words punched a hole in Sam’s belly, the blow almost physical.

  “Not here?”

  “She was here earlier. You know that. After you took Charlie home, you came back and—”

  “Not then. I’m not talking about then. Where is she now?”

  Sam raced out into the center of the lot, looking for something that had no place to hide. The asphalt was still wet. Somebody’d been hosing it down because there was no smell of any kind now. Roscoe Tungate and his brother Harry were still here.

  Harry Tungate approached her.

  “You find her?” he asked. “You find Abby?”

  “No, she’s here somewhere.” That was irrational, because it was clear Abby Clayton was not there. “She has to be.”

  “Why do you think she’s—?”

  “She went through the Jabberwock twenty minutes ago.”

  It might not even have been that long. Sam had flown down Route 17 from the county line to the Middle of Nowhere. Without having to turn off on Barber’s Mill Road, that wound its slow way through the hollow to Charlie’s mother’s house at the base of Little Bear Mountain, it was a straight shot.

  The Jabberwock should have deposited Abby here long before …

  But had Abby actually gone through the Jabberwock? Charlie had said she was in the river. The current would have washed her downstream and it was only about thirty, maybe forty feet to the Jabberwock. But had she somehow avoided it? Had she …

  Sam was grasping at straws.

  … hidden in the bushes in the darkness and Charlie hadn’t seen her?

  Or did she somehow swim against the current? The river was narrow and deep there, the curve had washed away the outside edge, making a hole a little past the Jabberwock so deep kids sometimes went there to go swimming. The water at the river’s edge was only about a foot deep, but would have been three or four feet deep within a few feet from the shore. Had Abby somehow managed to fight that current, in the dark, and swim upstream?

  Why would she do that?

  What she wanted — all she wanted — was in the opposite direction. Abby wanted to get out of the county, go get her baby. It’d make no sense for her to swim the other way.

  But clearly she had gone somewhere because she wasn’t here.

  Sam hadn’t been allowing herself to consider the ramifications of that, but she did now and the reality slammed like a wrecking ball into her chest.

  Without the key in Abby’s pocket, Charlie’s little girl would die.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Charlie didn’t know how much time she had spent banging her fists on the closed kiln door and screaming before Malachi took her by the shoulders and pulled her away. When he did, she turned into his arms and sobbed, great heaving, wrenching sobs that rose from the core of her being and tore her open as they exploded out of her.

  Her baby was locked up in there. In that tomb, that stone sarcophagus. There was no air in the tomb and without air, her baby would die.

  She found herself screaming again at the thought, but Malachi just held her while she did, held her when her knees folded up beneath her and she sank to the ground and he eased himself down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  Then her head snapped up.

  She looked at her watch.

  “It’s 4:01. Sam’s at the bus shelter by now, surely. It takes less than twenty minutes to get from the county line to the Middle of Nowhere.”

  “I’m sure she’s been there and gone by now.”

  “On her way here — right! How long can it take to get a key out of a pocket?”

  “If she’s driving anything like the way she drove when I was with her, she’ll come skidding into that driveway any second now.”

  “Any second.” Charlie looked at her watch again. “Yeah, any second.”

  She held onto the hope in those words, clinging to that tiny piece of driftwood in a hurricane-tossed sea.

  “And there’s still fourteen minutes — and maybe more. We don’t know for sure.” Charlie recited aloud the math she’d been figuring and refiguring in her head again and again. Length times width times height divided by twenty-seven … Abby’d said by thirty, but Charlie used twenty-seven. Six feet by six feet by six feet was 216 square feet, divided by twenty-seven was eight. Empty, there was almost eight cubic yards of air inside the kiln. Merrie could sleep peacefully in there all night. But the kiln wasn’t empty; it was almost full — of stuff. Boxes of pots, cups, bowls, vases, ashtrays — pottery. There were sacks of powdered clay, boxes of tools, a potter’s wheel, Christmas decorations — maybe the artificial tree, too. And a stack of carpet rolls! All that stuff was taking up space, reducing the amount of air inside the kiln, air Merrie needed to breathe.

  Charlie looked at her watch again. How could five minutes have passed? It wasn’t a digital watch and she could almost see the hands spinning around and around, faster and faster and—

  Less than ten minutes.

  “Could we pick the lock?” She said the words as she was thinking them, then scrambled to her feet, buoyed up by the hope that had swelled inside her like pulling the cord on a Navy dinghy. “We could! How? How do you pick a lock? But it can be done. You can use … what do you use? Something small, a piece of wire.”

  She knew she was babbling and could tell from the look on Malachi’s face that he didn’t for a moment believe it would work. But it would. He’d see. They’d pick the lock and get the door open before Sam even got here with the key.

  “I’ll find some wire to use.”

  She turned and ran into the garage, looking at everything at the same time, which amounted to looking at nothing at all. She had to focus, but there was precious little to focus on. Unlike the basement that she’d glanced into last night, the garage wasn’t filled with leftover whatever, the flotsam and jetsam of a life that her mother didn’t need anymore. The rows of shelving that once held pottery were now weighed down, stacked three and four deep, with hundreds of Mason jars where her mother had canned the vegetables she grew in her garden. The best of the pottery that’d once sat there was stored now in boxes in the kiln!

  The workbench didn’t have tools on it. A couple of flower pots sat on the far end. Some plastic vases from the flowers she or her sister sent to their mother on Mother’s Day took up dusty residence beside a small bag of plant food, two rusty buckets and a washtub. There was nothing in the garage smaller than a screwdriver. There was no hammer of any kind, any size.

  The space where her mother once had conducted ceramics classes was empty, the tables and benches gone. A wheelbarrow with a flat tire leaned up against the wall resting on its handles. Garden implements — rakes, hoes, shears, hand spades and an ancient pair of cotton gloves — hung from nails on the wall. There were bicycle racks where she and her sister must have kept their bikes but she had no memory of that. The big bay door was shut. If she needed more light she could pull it up. She’d left the car headlights on, but more light wouldn’t help her find what wasn’t there.

  She turned around and headed back outside, on her way to the kitchen to search the house for—

  “I don’t think trying to pick the lock is a good idea,” Malachi said, and some small part of her registered that he was bent over slightly, using his left elbow to press on the top of the bandage in the bullet wound in his side. Bullet wound. Abby’d shot him!

  Then the thought and concern were gone.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we could damage the lock, digging around inside it with the wrong tools, no clue what we’re doing. We could bend something, scratch something, knock something out of place so when Sam gets here with the key, it won’t work.”

  He was absolutely right, of course. What was she thinking? They didn’t dare fool with the lock.

&nbs
p; Charlie looked at her watch and wanted to scream. It was like some cartoon watch where the second and minute hands spun around and around, trailing the hour hand along with them. It was 4:10. Five minutes left.

  “I did the math in my head, but maybe I did it wrong. My mind’s too … help me figure …”

  She didn’t have to tell him what math. He’d grown up around coal mining same as she had. He looked at the building.

  “Six feet square … that’s six by six …”

  He continued to figure. Came up with the same numbers she had — eight hours if it were empty.

  “But it’s not empty.”

  “What’s in—?”

  “Stuff. Junk. Boxes. Storage. I haven’t looked in it in years.”

  “How much stuff? How much space was left?”

  And that was the thing. As she recalled, the kiln had been … almost full of boxes.

  Bang, her mind backed up from that thought so fast she tripped mentally, stumbled. No, she was wrong. That wasn’t it. There was almost nothing in the kiln. It was … almost empty. And empty, there were eight hours of air.

  It’s not empty. The voice spoke in her ear but Charlie wouldn’t listen.

  “There was no spare key,” she said, answering the question Malachi hadn’t asked. “Just the one. And Mama almost never locked the thing, just fastened it shut when she was firing something. She only locked it when she stopped using it … to make sure no kid got trapped …”

  Reality again dumped a ton of rocks on her head.

  “Malachi, my baby’s in there!”

  She turned to the kiln and hammered her fists on the door.

  The phone in the house rang.

  Who could possibly be calling at this hour? She didn’t even turn toward it.

  “Maybe it’s Sam, and she …” He stopped, obviously sorry he’d said anything at all.

  Her knees again turned to bags of water. If Sam had the key, she’d be on her way here with it. The only reason she’d have to call was if she didn’t have the key.

  Charlie looked helplessly into Malachi’s eyes. She couldn’t … she absolutely could not answer that—

  “I’ll get it.” He began hobbling across the grass toward the back porch steps. She could see that his wounds were bleeding again, had soaked through the ACE bandage. She ought to care about that but there was nothing left inside her to care with …

  She placed her lips close to the not-crack where the door fit so tight you couldn’t have slid a piece of paper between it and the jamb.

  “We’re coming, sweetheart. Mommy’s coming. It won’t be long.”

  Then she was sitting beside the door, leaning against it, didn’t remember sitting down. She was speaking into the crack but she didn’t know what she was saying.

  Merrie’d been a bumblebee last Halloween. She’d been adorable in the costume, yellow and black stripes and tiny bumblebee wings. It even had a rubber stinger on the butt and a little hat with antennae on coiled wires.

  Charlie had gone trick-or-treating with her, of course, held her hand, walked her up the sidewalks to each house in the neighborhood. She helped Merrie hold out the sack for the candy. Some of the neighbors had dressed up. Her friend Laverne came to the door as the Wicked Witch of the West and Merrie’d cowered away from her until she popped the fake wart off her nose and lifted the hat with long, stringy black hair attached so Merrie could see her blonde curls underneath.

  Charlie didn’t let Merrie keep any of the candy, of course. She had an identical Halloween sack full of candy hidden in the pantry, so she could swap it out and Merrie would never know. She wasn’t about to let the child eat candy that’d been given to her by a stranger!

  That was dangerous. No telling what—

  Merrie was behind these stone walls in an airless room. If she didn’t get out soon …

  Merrie would die. The most horrible words in the English language. No, not the most horrible. The most horrible were only three words, too. Merrie’s already dead.

  When she saw the look on Malachi’s face, she didn’t even have to ask.

  She heard his words — “Abby’s not there” — and the world went dark. Charlie McClintock left the building.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Sam drove slowly through the night toward Charlie’s house with no urgency and no hope. She had flown down Route 17 to the Middle of Nowhere, looking at her watch every few seconds. If Abby’d been there when Sam arrived in the Dollar Store parking lot, Sam would have snatched the key out of her pocket and raced to Charlie’s. She’d have made it there by ten minutes after four, with time to spare. They’d have used the key to open the kiln while Merrie still had air to breathe.

  But Abby hadn’t been there.

  As the minutes of Merrie’s life ticked away, Sam had paced around the empty parking lot searching, like she’d suddenly stumble over Abby’s body and she just hadn’t noticed it before.

  Sam had waited. And waited. Considering and discarding ways to save the child without the key.

  They could … drill a hole in the kiln to let in air.

  The walls were solid stone a foot thick with interior ceramic plates two inches thick. Where could they find a drill with a masonry bit that long? And there was no time to look.

  Break into the kiln, then use a sledgehammer and a chisel … Would Charlie’s mother have a sledgehammer? Chisels? How long would it take to dig through solid rock?

  Longer than ten minutes.

  And after a while … they didn’t even have ten minutes.

  Sam pulled in behind Charlie’s mother’s car in the driveway, turned off the key and sat for a moment. Gathered herself. The others in the parking lot had been horrified by her story. Liam, Abner, Rodney and the Tungate brothers wanted to dash to Charlie’s house to … yeah, to what? Break into the kiln? Even if they could have done that — and they couldn’t — by the time they were even considering it, it was too late. Some had wanted to come to Charlie’s with Sam — E.J. and Liam and Thelma Jackson — to … Again, to what? Just be there. But Sam’d told them no, that Charlie didn’t need an audience.

  What Sam was about to see was unfathomable grief and horror. Malachi had told her on the phone that Charlie was only a shade this side of completely hysterical and Sam was sure when Malachi told her Abby wasn’t at the bus shelter …

  Sam refused to put herself in Charlie’s shoes, to imagine what it would be like if it were Rusty locked in an airless kiln. Dying in there. Dead in there. She had resolutely shoved those horror nightmares out of her mind, but when she picked him up at Damien’s house, whenever that was … she would hug the boy harder than he ever allowed himself to be hugged. She’d kiss his whole face and not care that a twelve-year-old boy did not allow his mother to kiss him. She’d do it anyway. Right there in front of his friend. She didn’t care.

  After she got out of the car, she reached back in and got the bundle of gauze, sterile pads and tape she had brought to re-bandage Malachi’s wounds. As she walked toward the back gate leading into the backyard, she noticed it was dawn. Dawn out there on the flat anyway. A new day that wouldn’t officially arrive here in the mountains until the sun cleared the crest of Chisolm Bluff, the tallest mountain to the east, in about an hour and a half. But the sky above was blue, not black. The stars and the moon were gone. Light spilled over the top of the mountain and cascaded into the hollow below to give a golden glow to everything, brighten the puddles of shadows until they melted away and it was day.

  She opened the gate. The light above the side door of the garage shined down on Charlie and Malachi but the growing daylight gave texture to the rest of the yard, too. Charlie sat on the ground beside the door of the kiln, appeared to be talking into the crack.

  As Sam got closer, she could hear that Charlie was singing.

  “… gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

  The lump formed so instantly in Sam’s throat tears l
iterally squirted out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Malachi was on his knees behind Charlie, his hands on her shoulders, looked like he’d been rubbing her back. Sam knew Charlie had no idea he was there. She had gone to a whole other world, another dimension of human misery where there was no light or tenderness or hope.

  Sam hadn’t wanted to think about it as she drove to the house, but as she stood now looking at the stone monolith beside Charlie’s garage, she couldn’t imagine how they would ever get the door of the kiln open until they could find Abby and get the key. Liam said he and the Tungate brothers were going down to search the riverbank as soon as it got light. Sam thought that, given the shape Abby was in, she might have finally bled out or been too weak to swim and she’d drowned and her body was lying …. Yeah, lying where? If her dead body had washed down through the Jabberwock, wouldn’t it have come out in the parking lot? Maybe you had to be alive to … If her body just washed on downstream, as long as the Jabberwock held the county hostage, there was no way to get to it.

  And if they never found the key — never found Abby or found her body but the key wasn’t in her pocket — how would they ever get the kiln open? Maybe Lester Peetree who used to run the hardware store in Twig would be able to … he wasn’t a locksmith, though. It would take a locksmith from Lexington or Louisville to get into the lock. And the Jabberwock …

  Surely with enough manpower using jackhammers or chisels, there was some way to chisel into the bricks, dismantle the building from the outside. Or simply big men wielding sledgehammers — bam, bam, bam — destroy the building. Somehow, eventually, they’d get it open.

  Malachi looked up when she approached. Charlie just kept singing. Sam noticed Charlie’s hands, that her perfectly manicured nails were broken off, her fingertips raw. How had … Then she saw a broken piece of fingernail in the crack between the kiln door and the jamb.

  Sam swallowed hard, gritted her teeth to choke off a sob. She tried to take in a deep breath but her diaphragm refused to expand, only allowed her little sips of air. She stood where she was, getting control of herself before she dropped to her knees on the ground beside the other two and told Malachi quietly, “I need to take a look at those bandages.”