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

by Ninie Hammon

  It’s Mr. Witherspoon, the man who owns the Dollar General Store in the Middle of Nowhere.

  “If you came to be by yourself,” he says as he gets down off the table, “I was just leaving.” Then he recognizes her.

  “Oh, hello, Hayley.”

  “Hi Mr. Witherspoon, and you don’t have to leave because of me, I’ll just—”

  “You came here to be by yourself, didn’t you?” He hangs his head. “I get it. That’s why I came here, too.”

  The kindness and understanding in his voice are more than she can stand. She bursts into tears, doesn’t mean to but she has been holding onto the emotional outburst for so long she can no longer control it. He rushes to her side and puts his arm around her shoulder and the next thing she knows she’s clinging to him sobbing … and then …

  The rest just … happens. Neither of them planned it. He takes her virginity while she lies naked before him on the cold concrete of the picnic table, right out in the open where anybody who comes along can see, but theirs is such passionate, wild abandon they don’t even care.

  Afterwards, he’s not awkward with her. Helps her get dressed, touches her tenderly in places no one has ever touched her as he does. She had never known she possessed such passion.

  He only becomes awkward when he asks if he can see her again. And she begs, breathlessly, “Yes, please. Again and again and again.”

  He laughs, that wonderful, gentle laugh.

  That night when she got home, she was so consumed with emotion she had to pour out her feelings in her journal, writing so fast the ink smeared in places, described the whole thing. Well, not the real thing. Just what she wished had happened, what she fantasized. The tall dark stranger who found her there alone and ravished her, ripped her clothes away in a frenzy of uncontrolled desire, took her virginity as she looked up at him through her tears. She described his rugged face, his shock of unruly black hair and piercing blue eyes. She could see him as clearly as she had seen Mr. Witherspoon because she had been dreaming of him her whole life. Well, versions of him. For a while he looked like Brad Pitt, the way he looked as that hitchhiker in Thelma & Louise. Then he became Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. In fact, as Mr. Witherspoon was … doing it … she closed her eyes and pictured him, her dark stranger, the mat of black hair on his chest glistening with sweat as he took her. She always pictured him, every time. Of course, she never told Sugar Bear that.

  And she never again journaled about their meetings. In truth, she had never felt the need to journal about anything after Sugar Bear came into her life and shined light into all the dark places. She would journal about today, though, their last time together, because she was sure it would be heartbreaking, lovers torn out of each other’s arms. It would be just like that final scene in Casablanca. Rick made Ilsa leave him, sacrificed his own happiness, denied himself his only chance at true love. Maybe Sugar Bear would do that — send her away, deny himself. Or maybe she should.

  This time, Hayley parked in the secluded lot. Sugar Bear’s car was already there. He had come early because he was so anxious to see her! That butterfly feeling fluttered in her belly just like it always did before she saw him. They would make love today. She’d come prepared, had taken a shower and put on her best perfume, dabbed it between her breasts where he liked to snuggle his nose. They would make love and talk about what the future might bring for both of them. And maybe it wasn’t all bad. Maybe Sugar Bear had their future all planned out.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sam was proud of Liam Montgomery. He had manned up since the day he sat in the bus shelter, moaning softly about the “needle” in his head. Even though he’d been low man on the totem pole in the sheriff’s department before J-Day, he had accepted law enforcement responsibility for the county, and his uniform alone stood for something, gave a sense of assurance that there was somebody here who was in charge and knew what they were doing.

  That sense had been waning as the days stacked up one on top of the other, though. It had taken flight alongside the belief that whatever the Jabberwock was, they’d wake up in the morning and it’d be gone just like they’d awakened to find its shimmering presence surrounding the county two weeks ago.

  After all, it was only temporary, right? And if you didn’t cross it — literally — it only mattered when it was important to get out of the county or to get something in. Most people believed that the Jabberwock itself was harmless — after all, it was just some bizarre meteorological anomaly that’d blown in and would soon blow back out and they could go on with their lives.

  It was, wasn’t it?

  “I don’t have to tell anybody in this room that something is happening here to all of us that has changed everything in our lives. We’ve all been dealing with it individually, in our own ways, but I believe it’s time for us to figure out how we, all of us, as nowhere people need to respond as a group, doing together what none of us can do individually.”

  Sebastian Nower stepped up beside Liam then and literally pushed him away from the microphone. Liam probably wasn’t expecting such rudeness from the old man, and was too polite to confront it; after all, the old man was near eighty and maybe some key synapses weren’t firing anymore.

  “Thank you, son,” he said dismissively, and turned back to the crowd. “I know you people are looking for guidance and assistance in this time of our mutual need and the Nower family has for generations taken seriously its responsibility to the people in the county we founded when a contingent of settlers came through the Cumberland Gap to stake their claim in the settlement called Nower’s Trace more than two hundred years ago.”

  And he was off to the races.

  He was an imposing figure, she’d give him that. He’d been tall and broad-shouldered in his youth — all of which he spent in schools or elsewhere outside the county that was his family’s namesake. But the years had shrunken him, bent his back and taken the meat and muscle off his bones. Standing at the microphone in a business suit so he looked like he had just ducked out of some important board meeting during which important people would discuss important things, but he had deigned to surrender a little of this important time to lead the Great Unwashed out of the desert and into the Promised Land.

  The suit hid his slat-thin frame, sharp elbows and shoulders, set below a face with gaunt cheeks and a fleshless chin that resembled the knob of a femur. His was the wind-scoured, sun-weathered skin of a cowboy or a sea captain. He was neither, of course, had merely spent a lifetime ignoring his dermatologist’s warning not to lay out on the beach too long.

  But he could not hide the signature attribute of the Nower family, clearly passed on to him by a recessive gene — an Adam’s apple more prominent than his nose. You could amuse yourself while he droned on by watching it bob up and down in his skinny neck like the cork on a fishing line.

  Sebastian McFarland Nower III was an eccentric whose every statement was taken with enough salt to crust the rims of a million margarita glasses. To his credit, Liam was in the process of taking back the meeting Nower had hijacked when the chaos broke out — from different parts of the room at the same time, like a spark had lit fuses in several places at once.

  “There’s a murderer loose out there roaming around free as the breeze,” called out a woman from the far side of the room whose voice had the distinctive caw of a crow. No, a rooster — Wilma Thacker. “He’s preying on older women all alone in the world ‘thout no man to protect and defend them. I want to know what the deputy sheriff’s doing to catch him.”

  Liam tried to respond but he was shouted down by another voice from the other side of the room.

  “A man who’d kill his own kin like that, smash her head in so’s you couldn’t even recognize—”

  “Martha Whittiker’s head was not—”

  “Martha Whittiker! Somebody killed Martha Whittiker?”

  “You saying she’s dead?”

  “Who’d a’done a thing like that to the poor little—?”

/>   “That worthless grandson of hers, that’s who,” said Ethel Porter, another of Martha’s neighbors. “I keep this here loaded gun right by my bed.” She waved the pistol in the air as casually as a pompom at a football game. It occurred to Sam then that Ethel wasn’t the only person in the crowd with a weapon. Probably half the people in the room were packing. Guns and this kind of tension — a dangerous combination. “I gonna lock my doors, too, ever night now and I ain’t never done that before.”

  Voices began to pop off like popcorn heated up in a skillet.

  “Need to string him up.”

  “Hanging’s too good for him.”

  “Beat your own grandma to death with a claw hammer, he’d ought to—”

  “It ain’t like he’s got anywhere to run to. Oughta be easy for Liam to find—”

  “I’m not looking for Dylan Shaw. I don’t believe he—”

  “You ain’t even lookin’ for him?”

  “A man who’d club his little old grandmother to death and you ain’t gonna protect us from him?”

  “He ain’t the only one’s gonna do murder,” called a male voice from the back and the crowd turned to look. It was George Gribbins. Sam’d heard he’d tried to stand up to Viola the day she took over Foodtown and she’d put him in his place. “Bobby Joe don’t give me back my hay rake, I’m gonna—”

  “Yore hay rake?” Bobby Joe Mattingly responded. “A fella don’t get to keep a thing after he done sold it to somebody else.”

  “I never sold you a dang thing!”

  “You think them chickens I traded was early Christmas presents?”

  “You didn’t trade me no chickens! Betty Ann paid you for them chickens.”

  “Chickens ain’t the onliest thing George Gribbins and his kin’s took.” That was Buford Haywood, who’d lost an eye and part of his nose in a mining accident and wore a black eyepatch like a pirate. “If another one of my sheep goes missing—”

  “You accusing me of stealing a sheep? What would I want—?

  “Well, somebody took it. And you’s the last one—”

  “Musta been Bobby Joe ‘cause a man who’d steal a hay rake would steal—”

  The sound had ratcheted up in no time into a full-bore shouting match. The Gribbins family — maybe a dozen of them had shown up at the meeting — were yelling at the Mattinglys and the Haywoods. And in less time than it took to tell about it, others were choosing sides in the dispute, threatening all manner of violence.

  Charlie shot Sam a frightened look, reached down and puled Merrie up into her arms, turned and headed for the door. Sam looked longingly past her to the empty doorway. Where was Malachi? He could get control of this—

  Then George lunged at Bobby Joe, throwing a roundhouse punch that if it had connected might have severed B.J.’s head from his shoulder blades. But for all his strength, George was slow, and Bobby Joe dodged the blow and threw himself at George.

  “You keep your hands off my brother,” cried Carl Gribbins. “I’m a’snatch the lot of you baldheaded—”

  “—come get my hay rake—”

  “Musta been who busted that fence line. I knowed it was a Haywood done it.”

  The jostling crowd had become a mob in seconds, an angry mob. Maybe it was just-below-the-surface fear of what was happening to them, the pent-up frustration of being locked in.

  The bomb had gone off so suddenly, men were fighting everywhere, throwing punches, wrestling on the floor, yelling and cursing and kicking. It was impossible to tell who was on whose side. Those who’d chosen not to take anybody’s side in the brawl had been pushed to the sides and back of the room. From a vantage point against the back wall, Sam saw Liam leap off the stage, and begin shoving his way through the crowd to get to the tangle of men throwing punches.

  “… put that gun down!” Liam’s voice rang out above the cacophony of voices. “All of you, put your guns away—”

  Bam!

  The gunshot was like a howitzer going off in the confined space of the auditorium. The crowd gasped as one, shocked into silence by the sound.

  Suddenly, Sam was afraid. The people were backing up away from something. She was tall and strong and she shoved smaller people out of the way, until she came to the spot where the crowd had parted, away from the body of a man lying face-down on the floor. It was Liam Montgomery, his own pistol beside his limp hand, blood spreading out in a puddle around him.

  Sam knelt beside him and he looked up at her with wide, beseeching eyes. Blood formed in the bubbles on his lips when he tried to speak and ran in a trickle out the side of his mouth and down his cheek.

  Before Sam even had a chance to find where he’d been shot, somebody stumbled into her, knocking her over on top of Liam’s body.

  “Who shot Liam?”

  “Wasn’t me!”

  “Me neither.”

  “You was the one. You and your worthless brothers, a bunch of bottom-feeding—”

  The yelling became a single big roar of sound that Sam ignored while she tried to get back onto her hands and knees. But the crowd had closed in around them. She saw someone step on Liam’s hand, someone kicked her in the thigh and—

  Bam!

  Another shot rang out, followed by two more.

  The crowd was shocked into silence.

  “Next person touches a weapon, I will put you down soon’s I would a lame horse.”

  The voice was stern and vicious. Viola Tackett.

  At some point in the riot, and that’s what it had degenerated into, Viola had moved to the front of the room and up onto the stage. She stood there now with a rifle in her hands. A rifle! Where did she get a rifle? She hadn’t been armed with it when Sam saw her and the boys enter the room.

  With her cheek on the stock, Viola swept the barrel back and forth over the crowd, ready to pull the trigger.

  Every person in the room knew that Viola Tackett would drop them in their tracks with no more concern than swatting a fly. Her oldest son, Neb, was beside her, holding a pistol in a two-hand grip like the cops on television. Obie stood at one corner of the stage, Zach stood at the other — all pointing weapons out into the crowd. They were arranged so perfectly, it looked like they’d rehearsed the drill.

  The crowd was totally outgunned and knew it. Nobody would go up against the whole Tackett clan, every one of them as likely to put a hole in you as the next. From their position on the stage, they could have taken out a SWAT team or a squad of Navy SEALs.

  “All them weapons, on the floor, now,” Viola demanded, and maybe a dozen people leaned over and placed all manner of firepower on the floor in front of them. “Now get back away so Miss Sheridan can see to Liam.”

  Sam felt the crush of the crowd around her pull away as everyone hurried to do exactly what Viola Tackett had directed. Sam sat back up onto her knees, trying to get a look at Liam in the sudden light that now replaced the forest of legs around her.

  Liam’s eyes were no longer pleading, beseeching. They stared out sightlessly, the pupils fixed.

  Sam let out a little cry, couldn’t help it, and the scream was echoed all around the room, handed from one woman to the next, though most didn’t know what it was they were screaming at.

  “Liam!” she cried, her husky voice suddenly tear-clotted. But there was no response. She put her fingers to his neck, feeling for the pulse, the rhythmic thumping of the carotid artery, echoing the rhythm of his beating heart. But Liam Montgomery gave off no pulse to echo. It was still.

  Sam looked up at Viola, who stood with her cheek to the stock of her rifle, ready to fire, and spoke into the startled silence.

  “He’s dead,” Sam said, then sloughed off her professional detachment like dropping a shawl off her shoulders. She leaned over his body, put her arms around him and began to cry.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sugar Bear was seated on the picnic table, with his feet on the concrete bench beside it, looking just like he did the first time she saw him here. The image took
her breath way and she couldn’t stifle a sob. He turned and looked at her then, didn’t say anything, just got to his feet and held out his arms and she rushed into them.

  She cried there for a long time, just as she had done the first time she met him here. But he didn’t touch her, slide his hand tantalizingly up her back to unhook her bra strap. Her breasts were large, D cups, heavy and pendulous, and when he had fondled them, she understood for the first time what it meant to be aroused. She’d been panting then, gasping for air, and when he’d leaned over and kissed her there, each one, she would have collapsed from desire if she hadn’t been leaning against the table.

  Now, he only held her while she cried, patting her back tenderly. She wanted his tenderness, of course, but she needed his passion. She needed to know he still wanted her, still loved her. She needed to feel his presence inside her.

  But she did have his presence inside her. Carried his baby under her heart. And that’s what they had met to talk about. What that meant for both their futures.

  She struggled to control her sobbing, knew that her tears had totally destroyed her makeup, that her mascara was running in twin black lines down her cheeks and if she wiped it, it would smear and she’d look like a Halloween mask. she shouldn’t have cried, didn’t want him to see her like this, their last time.

  Last time.

  The words threatened to send her into another round of near-hysterical bawling, but she grabbed hold of her emotions. She needed to be strong now. He would want her to be strong. And she had to show him, demonstrate to him that she could be strong … could remain silent and stoic while he waited for her.

  Somehow he had guided her to one of the benches attached to the table, facing out, looking out at the view from the Top of the World, only a few feet from the post that held the dangling remains of the restraining fence.

  He sat beside her and she pulled out of his arms, wishing for all the world that she’d thought to bring tissues. Why hadn’t she thought about that; she had known she was going to cry. But she hadn’t and could do nothing better than to lift the hem of her Eastern Kentucky University tee-shirt and use it to wipe the black off her face.