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

by Ninie Hammon

  People stayed clear of the businesses whose owners were still here, though. Mostly. But somebody — teenagers, perhaps — had broken into Lester Peetree’s hardware store, vandalized the place and took all the guns and ammunition. Candy and soft drinks, too. What did teenagers plan to do with the weaponry — if it had, indeed, been teenagers who took it? Should Liam be out there trying to find out? And what if somebody got so desperate for a rocking chair or a footstool or a lampshade that they showed up at Stovall’s Used Furniture Store with a gun and demanded that Joe Stovall hand one over? There probably weren’t half a dozen people in the whole county who didn’t have access to some kind of firearm. So what if somebody used a weapon to steal something? Armed robbery wasn’t a crime you could let slide.

  Liam probably hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since J-Day. Not so much stewing over what was happening, but worried sick about what he was supposed to do about it. Then he’d let it go and accepted that he’d just have to figure it out as he went along. One thing at a time. That was the best Liam could do until the county meeting tonight. He had invested a lot of emotional capital in the meeting and desperately wanted to believe that something would come of it.

  Figuring folks might not show up if “the law” called a meeting, Liam convinced Sebastian Nower to call it. The great-great grandson of the county’s founder was a bombastic blowhard who loved nothing more than the sound of his own voice. If he got the upper hand, he’d do all the talking, fight to the death to make sure things were done whatever way he wanted them done, and then preen around importantly, finally given the respect due him for his stellar genetics and lineage.

  Liam couldn’t let that happen.

  It had taken two weeks’ worth of soul searching for Liam to come around to an understanding of the new nature of the universe and his own place in it. He believed dire circumstances made great men. There was lots of historic proof of that — like Alvin York, that World War I soldier from a farm in Tennessee who killed all those Germans, or that Texas soldier, Audie Murphy, who became a movie star. Men who stepped forward when the need arose and made a difference. Liam Montgomery was determined to be that man in Nower County. Somebody had to step into the leadership vacuum that existed here, somebody willing to make the hard calls and suffer the consequences of his decisions. He believed the county’s 3,500 residents were teetering on the brink of chaos. And he genuinely believed that was the county population, no matter what Viola Tackett said, though, granted, they certainly hadn’t all been inside the county’s borders when the Jabberwock locked the doors. Out of all those people, Liam Montgomery was the only person who could lay claim to legitimate authority.

  He would man up when the time came, take charge.

  Oh, it wasn’t like Liam was looking forward to what lay ahead, but he could clearly see his duty and he would perform it to his dying breath. He wasn’t looking forward to questioning Reece Tibbits, either, didn’t have any idea what he’d do with the man once he had. The only thing he was certain of was that the doing of it was his responsibility. If Liam didn’t take charge, who would?

  Chapter Eleven

  The old black man seated across the table from Stuart hadn’t lost even half a step in his mental fitness, was sharp, articulate — a bit stiff and unyielding, but that was to be expected, given that he’d never met Stuart. And Stuart tried to keep reminding himself that he was … what was it Charlie had called it? Oh yeah, Stuart was from “Away from Here,” which made him and everything he said suspect. But Cotton Jackson didn’t strike Stuart as that clannish. Maybe he was just reserved because the subject matter called for reserve. For skepticism. Should be taken with a dump-truck load of salt.

  Stuart McClintock had never spoken nor listened to anything as lock-me-up-with-the-rest-of-the-looney-tunes-in-Saint-Somebody’s-Home-for-the-Bewildered-and-swallow-the-key as what was said in that kitchen that day.

  The kitchen was in a tidy brick house with a manicured yard and rose bushes growing in rich profusion around the porch. When Stuart leaned over to smell one of the blossoms, Cotton said merely, “Thelma,” and there was such longing in the single word it broke Stuart’s heart.

  The kitchen that was almost bare — a table, chairs, coffee pot, and four cups in an otherwise empty cabinet. There was no furniture in the dining room or den, which Stuart could see from the kitchen, just bare hardwood floors, not even so much as a throw rug.

  It looked just like Charlie’s mother’s house had looked.

  There were pictures on the walls, though, and even from where he stood in the kitchen, Stuart could tell that the shots were of a family of three — mother, father and a little boy — who grew up in other pictures into a handsome man in a uniform. The standard “soldier” picture hung above the mantle, blown up huge, with medals arranged beside it in the frame. It had the look of a memorial, so Stuart didn’t ask.

  Stuart took off his suit jacket and draped it over the back of the chair, unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up to his elbows while Cotton made coffee. After he’d served Stuart the promised cup — Stuart took it with cream and sugar but was reluctant to ask because he suspected Cotton didn’t have any of either — Cotton began the conversation by answering a question Stuart hadn’t asked.

  “Because I was my parents’ eleventh child and my father’s response to finding out my mother was pregnant with me was, ‘I don’t cotton to having another mouth to feed.’”

  Then the old man described coming home on Sunday afternoon, June 4, exhausted from a short night of sleep, looking forward to a hot meal and a soft bed. He’d tried several times to call and tell his wife what time to expect him, but she didn’t answer. Which was odd, but he let it go.

  “I felt something … strange when I pulled into the driveway. I felt … frightened. And that was crazy, but I couldn’t help it. I felt … afraid.”

  Stuart thought about how he’d felt earlier sitting in the driveway of Charlie’s mother’s house.

  “Her car wasn’t in the driveway, but I figured she’d just put it into the garage. Thelma wasn’t home. Wasn’t … anywhere. And the house was bare … nothing in it, no furniture, clothes, dishes, duct tape, pillow cases, drain cleaner … nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  He was so horrified and mystified and terrified that he …

  “Ran around like a chicken with my head cut off.”

  He thoroughly searched the premises for Thelma — the house, the yard, the garage, the little patch of garden behind the garage, the attic and basement, and started trying to call family members, neighbors … anybody. Nobody answered. The phones just rang and rang. Obviously there was something wrong with the lines, some kind of outage.

  So he got back into his car and went looking for Thelma.

  And discovered that not only was Thelma missing, so was everybody else in the county. He went to house after house and found them all empty — furniture and belongings gone, no cars in the driveways, nobody home.

  When he’d completed his story, Stuart blurted out the first thing that came to his mind — “that’s the craziest tale I ever heard” — and immediately regretted being blunt and rude.

  Cotton didn’t seem to be offended, just stood, took Stuart’s coffee cup and turned to the sink where there were already a couple of dirty plates and some silverware.

  “We got a dishwasher.” He nodded toward the appliance under the countertop. “Wanna know how spoiled I am? I never learned how to run the thing, so …”

  He gestured toward the sink.

  “I went to Walmart in Carlisle for what I absolutely had to have” — nodded toward the card table and folding chairs — “thought I got everything, but forgot to get a dish drainer.”

  Rinsing the cup and spoon, he set them in the sink beside the other dishes, then turned toward the door.

  “The man you described, the guy who blew a hole in the road and then went poof and vanished—” Stuart winced at the reference, but it was indeed what he had s
aid. Actually, the man had done a two-fer, had appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared into nowhere. “I know a man named Reece Tibbits, who had to be the guy you saw. He lives on Sugar Bowl Mountain off Cicada Springs Road with his wife, Cissy, and daughters — Sue-Sue and … Patty, I think. How about we go pay them a visit?”

  Cotton drove. In an era when everybody else in the world was ditching their gas-guzzlers for Hondas and Toyotas, Cotton Jackson drove a 1993 Chrysler Concorde. Big and roomy. As they wound around through the mountains, Stuart would have been hopelessly lost if Cotton hadn’t provided a running-commentary geography lesson.

  Chimney Rock Pike to Elkhorn Road to CR 278 W, then onto Barber’s Mill Road, the road where Charlie’s mother’s house was located, only they turned south on it instead of north. That led to Gallagher Station Road and they turned right on it onto Cicada Springs Road.

  Cotton stopped at every house they passed. Went to the door and knocked. Called out, looked in the yard and in the outbuildings.

  Nothing.

  Nobody.

  One after another.

  When they pulled into the driveway of an old house that was literally falling down, the roof had collapsed on the back and the chimney had fallen over into the yard, Cotton just sat, looking at it.

  “This is Reece Tibbits’s place,” he said.

  Stuart must have misunderstood what Cotton’d told him because he’d thought they were going to the place the Tibbits guy and his family lived, not some house maybe his grandparents grew up in. Stuart started to ask questions, but Cotton’s face silenced him. The man looked not only troubled, but enlightened, a guy who had just solved a mystery, had figured out where the next lightning bolt was going to strike — but realized he was standing on the spot.

  Though he was convinced by the parade of empty houses that the whole population of the county had … well, at least they were not there, Stuart wasn’t ready yet to own “vanished.”

  Cotton didn’t stop anymore at every house they passed as they left the “weathered estate” of the Reece Tibbits family and drove back through the Middle of Nowhere where he’d met Cotton and on into an actual small town Cotton said had once been “incorporated,” though Stuart didn’t know what that meant. The name of the town was Persimmon Ridge. It was a ghost town. No one on the street. The stores closed. Not boarded up, just closed. Like somebody would come back in after their lunch break and open them for business. Stuart rubbernecked at all the emptiness, his grip on what he considered “reality” growing looser by the second.

  They passed a store with a sign that identified it as Peetree’s Hardware Store and Cotton pulled up in front of it and stopped briefly.

  “Front door’s closed,” he said. “No cut fingers.”

  Stuart was by this time so stunned, had had the breath so totally knocked out of him that he didn’t even ask what Cotton was talking about.

  They hadn’t stopped at the handful of houses they’d passed on the way to Persimmon Ridge that were just as old as the Tibbits place, relics nobody’d lived in for years, generations. Cotton had identified them as they passed, though. “That’s the Johnson place,” he had said of a pile of rotted timber that hadn’t been a habitable abode in half a century. Or simply, “The Pruitts.”

  When they passed a couple of businesses in Persimmon Ridge that were in the same condition as the Tibbits’s “estate,” Stuart was curious, found it hard to fathom how the businesses in the small town that might not look thriving but were still at least serviceable, could be shoulder to shoulder on the street with dilapidated relics. Why hadn’t the town or the nearby business owners gotten rid of the shacks?

  When he asked, Cotton gave him a look that Stuart was beginning to interpret as: “You ready for this?” He wasn’t, but pushed forward.

  “Why have they been left standing?”

  “Because this time yesterday, or last week or Arbor Day, they weren’t relics. They looked just like the buildings around them. They weren’t … old.”

  Now that was insanity.

  “They weren’t old? How does a building suddenly get … old? And why?”

  “I don’t have any idea, but I’m developing a theory. You seeing Reece out there this morning, vanishing out of the middle of the road, got me thinking.” He pulled into an empty parking space beside a whole street full of empty parking spaces and turned to look at Stuart. “I drove past Reece Tibbits’s house yesterday.” He said the words slowly, reluctantly. “It was … just your basic little three-bedroom clapboard house. Paint was beginning to peel but not bad. Grass needed mowing. It was just like all the others we’ve passed today … nobody was home. But now …”

  Stuart suddenly understood.

  “Are you telling me that falling-down shack on Cicada Springs Road was Reece Tibbits’s home? I thought you’d taken me to see where his grandmother was born or something.”

  “Yesterday it was … just a house. Today it’s … aged a century. And Reece vanished this morning. I’m wondering … what’s the connection?”

  Stuart was still a step behind, trying to wrap his mind around it, that the falling-down ruin he’d seen a little while ago had been a normal house twenty-four hours ago, a place somebody lived. Except, well, nobody did.

  He couldn’t see any connection, but he let it go, let it all go, no longer able to contain the biggest question of all, the one that’d been buzzing around in his head since he met Cotton.

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody about this, Cotton? Why didn’t you report it to the police? A whole county full of people — how many is that?” Cotton just shrugged, his mind clearly somewhere else. “Okay, a thousand people, let’s say it’s a thousand people, two thousand — and they’re gone. Why didn’t you call the authorities?”

  Cotton gave him a look that was almost sad, like he knew what he was about to say was not going to received well.

  “I did report it, Stuart. To every state agency I could find and tried to get the federal government involved.”

  “And …?”

  “And nothing. They didn’t do a thing.”

  “Why not?”

  Stuart’s mind was spinning.

  Cotton said nothing, then held up his finger, the way you do to say, “Wait, I have just one more thing.”

  “But before I show you, I want you to do something for me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Cotton reached past Stuart and dug around in the glove box of his car, and pulled out a piece of paper — actually, it was the envelope to use to mail in your fine for a parking ticket — and a pen. He handed the paper to Stuart.

  Stuart thought about what he’d written on the chalkboard in Charlie’s kitchen, what had happened next, and clenched his teeth, bulging out the muscle in his jaw.

  Cotton saw it.

  “This will be like that. It will totally creep you out. But a picture is worth a thousand words, saves a lot of explaining.” He handed him the pen. “Write a note to yourself. Put down the time and the date and then jot down — just a couple of sentences — what you’ve seen in the past couple of hours.”

  “But why—?”

  “Just do it. Humor me.”

  Stuart took the paper and pen and jotted down the empty houses, the old shacks, and the man who disappeared after he blew a hole in the road. It was hard to make himself put down the part about the note to Charlie that had vanished but he forced himself to do it.

  He held out the paper to Cotton, who held up his hand and shook his head.

  “It’s not for me. It’s for you. I want you to put that in your shirt pocket.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Just do it! I don’t have the energy to argue with you.”

  Stuart folded the paper and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  Cotton started the car and pulled out of the parking place.

  “Where are we going now?”

  “To my house to get your car so you can drive us to Carlisle, the county seat of B
eaufort County.” Cotton paused. “Well, at least part of the way there.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Liam was on his way from Reece Tibbits’s house to talk to Reece’s mother, Grace. And how was he going to tell her what he’d found at Reece’s place? The woman was dying! How could he tell her that something totally impossible had happened? She wouldn’t believe him, he didn’t think, and then he’d have to take her there and show her. He was not looking forward to that.

  What was happening?

  Of course, that was the essential question about everything in life these days. What was happening?

  How could Reece Tibbits’s house have … have aged, turned into a dilapidated pile of rotting timber when yesterday it had been …

  Where was Cissy? Reece’s wife was a quiet woman. Liam wouldn’t use the word mousey but everybody else did. And in truth it fit. She was small, unassuming, with her shoulders hunched most of the time and her eyes averted. He had never heard her say more than two or three words at a stretch, though he understood from Reece’s drinking buddies that he complained about her incessant whining, nagging him to do first one thing and then another until he retreated to his woodshop, the only place he could go to be free of her because she was allergic to sawdust.

  Where was she?

  And the girls? Reece had two daughters, teenagers, as quiet and unassuming as their mother. Where were Sue-Sue and Patty?

  “Unit two, this is dispatch, come back,” came the words out of his radio. Seriously. Unit two? There were no units one or three or four or … he was the only unit, but Betty Greenleaf was … best described as the star of her own movie.

  “This is Unit two.”

  “Unit two … we have a reported code ten, eight, seven at 1235 Sugarloaf Lane in the Ridge.” Her voice was hushed. From the gravity of the situation, of course. Unless she’d gotten her codes wrong — which she hadn’t because they hung on a chart right in front of the radio unit and she’d pronounced each number separately like she’d been trained to — then she was dispatching him to a murder scene. The tingle of excitement he heard underlying her words convinced him she hadn’t screwed up the codes, didn’t think she was telling him about a dog off the leash instead of a dead body.