The Third Hill North of Town

by Noah Bly

  “DADDY?”

  Julianna’s voice was louder this time; it sounded as if she were in the kitchen. Eben didn’t know how such a thing could be possible, though; what he could see of the kitchen at the bottom of the steps was an image from hell itself; floor-to-ceiling flames of red, orange, blue, yellow, and white, flames so high and bright they could cook the soul out of a person in less time than it took to incinerate an ant in a wood stove.

  “GET OUT, SWEETHEART!” Eben shrieked, not knowing where Julianna was, but knowing she was going to die if she were still in the house. “GET OUT NOW!”

  Emma’s night slip caught fire, and then Eben’s pants. Eben howled in terror but continued hopping down the steps, having no alternative but to keep going. He made it down three more stairs before tumbling down the rest of the staircase; he landed on top of Emma on the kitchen floor and the wood beneath their bodies groaned as they slammed into it.

  “DADDY!”

  The last thing Eben saw before his hair caught fire and he lost all awareness of his surroundings was his daughter, standing on the outside steps of the back porch and clawing wildly at the red-hot door screen that was preventing her from reaching him. She had never made it inside the house; the pennies Rufus Tarwater had so artfully jammed into the door frame were now serving to safeguard the sole surviving Larson, who otherwise would have joined the rest of her family in their fate that night.

  Eben Larson did not know of Rufus’s pennies, nor was he capable of any thought whatsoever by this point. He was more fire than man now, and the only feeling left to him before his consciousness fled was pain. Pain past bearing, pain without limits. Yet before the end he had seen his daughter, alive and safely outside the house; he had known she loved him and was doing all she could to save him. Whatever torments of the damned he suffered afterward, surely he was at least granted that much in the way of comfort before everything became meaningless to him.

  Or so Julianna told herself for years to come, to keep from going mad.

  The tragedy at the Larson farm was not the only game in town that night.

  Fewer than three minutes after Rufus Tarwater tossed a burning torch through Eben Larson’s study window, Dr. Wilbur Colby’s cat, Zeke (short for Ezekiel), knocked a candle and a half-full bottle of whiskey off the nightstand in Colby’s bedroom, while the good doctor—a widower who lived alone—was squatting in the outhouse behind his home in downtown Pawnee. The flame on the candle ignited the spilled whiskey, and the bedspread and mattress quickly caught fire, as did a dog-eared copy of the Bible, open and facedown, that Colby had left beside his pillow. By the time Colby returned from the outhouse, the entire top floor of his residence was ablaze.

  Colby’s cramped living quarters were on the floor above his office, right next to the general goods store. The doctor’s initial attempts to extinguish the fire were severely hampered by inebriation; the half-full bottle of whiskey that had been shattered by Zeke (real Scotch whiskey from a grateful Scottish patient who had smuggled a case of the illegal stuff into the country) had been completely full earlier in the evening, and Colby, normally a teetotaler, had declined to share a drop of the precious liquor with anyone. As a result, no one else became aware of the fire until more than a few stray flames had traveled down the side of Colby’s office and scurried over to the general goods store. One of these bright, overeager flames spied a shelf with several gallon jugs of kerosene on it, and—rather more generous than Dr. Colby had been with his Scotch—graciously invited a few of its friends to join it in a toast.

  And that was all it took.

  Three-quarters of Pawnee’s 137 residents lived on farms outside of town and were in no danger whatsoever, but those closer in were not so lucky. The general goods store was next to the bakery and the smithy; the smithy abutted a shed that held, among other things, a twenty-gallon tank of gasoline. All the buildings in Pawnee were made of wood, and it had been a dry spring in northern Missouri. The post office, the school, the telephone /telegraph office, the bakery, half a dozen private homes—in short, every single structure on Pawnee’s only street—was either leveled or already beyond saving in less than an hour, and all the attempts to prevent the fire from spreading from one place to another proved to be futile, especially because Pawnee had no fire department, and nowhere near the manpower to deal with such a fierce conflagration.

  Hence the reason the glow from the Larson farm, a mile and a half to the north, went virtually unnoticed, though some people the next day would recall hearing gunshots in the distance. And while the Larson family and Ben Taylor would certainly be mourned a great deal, they were not the only casualties on that Sunday night in June. Seventeen people died in the Pawnee fire of 1923, more than half of whom were trying to help their friends and neighbors escape the devastation. One of these was Doc Colby, who was crushed by a falling roof beam while attempting to rescue the family of Lars Olson, the blacksmith; another was Tom Putnam (a janitor at Julianna’s school in Hatfield), who tried to save Zeke the cat, and was last seen carrying the terrified creature in his arms and running for the back door of the doctor’s office when the ceiling above them collapsed.

  The oddest death of the night, however, belonged to Clyde Rayburn, the next-door neighbor of the Larsons. Clyde—yet another bachelor—awoke at midnight in his bed. A childhood illness had left him mostly deaf, and thus he’d heard nothing of the gunshots over at the Larsons’ house. What had awakened him had been the smell of smoke on the night breeze. He stuck his head out the window to track down the source of the smell, and was shocked to see two major fires at work, one to the north and one to the south. He ran as fast as his gouty feet would allow, threw a saddle on his horse, Celeste, and galloped toward the Larsons’ home. He had almost reached the Larsons’ driveway when a fragment of still-burning ash drifted from the sky and extinguished itself in one of Celeste’s eyes, causing the beast to buck wildly. Clyde tumbled from the saddle, catching his foot in the stirrups, and a frenzied Celeste dragged her owner for a quarter of a mile on the gravel road, well past the Larsons’ house and out into their cornfield before at last subsiding. Clyde ended up on his back with his foot still snared in the stirrup; he bled to death in the field, gazing up at the smoke-filled sky.

  Coincidence loves playing with fire.

  Chapter 13

  Julianna Dapper lifted the bloody bandages on Jon Tate’s chest as gently as she could and bit her lip as his face tightened in pain.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she chided, hiding her concern. She inspected the small, evil-looking hole by his left armpit first, then made him twist around on the backseat of the squad car so she could get a better look at the larger exit wound an inch or so away from his shoulder blade. She was on her knees in the driver’s seat, facing the rear of the car; she had to duck her head to avoid hitting it on the feeble dome light that was their only illumination. She relaxed after a moment and released Jon with a satisfied smile. His bleeding had slowed significantly since they had fled the Creighton County jailhouse twenty minutes ago, and she felt certain he’d be fine until they reached Pawnee.

  “It looks much better,” she said. “You’re in no danger.”

  He grimaced and muttered thanks, slumping against the seat behind him with a groan.

  “Momma can stitch you up when we get home.” Julianna faced front again, her knees popping as she straightened her legs under the steering wheel. She caught Jon’s eye in the rearview mirror before turning off the dome light. “But I surely hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

  Julianna, Jon Tate, and Elijah Hunter were parked out of sight behind the boarded-up Dairy Queen in Mullwein, Iowa, right around the corner from where Sheriff Buckley and Bonnor Tucker had trapped them earlier that evening. Chuck Stockton’s lime-green Volkswagen was still where Bonnor had left it to be towed the following morning, beside a faded sign advertising nineteen-cent hamburgers and twelve-cent Dilly bars. The night air was sticky and still; a swarm of moths was besieging a stre
etlight in the distance.

  “What are you talking about?” Jon demanded. He didn’t mean to snap at Julianna, but he was exhausted, on edge, and in a fair amount of pain.

  “Günter’s lock, silly,” she said mildly. “If you hadn’t broken Günter’s lock yesterday, none of this would have happened.”

  Jon put his face in his hands. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea, Jon?” Elijah broke in from the passenger seat. He was looking over at the rear bumper of the Volkswagen, which was all that could be seen of it from their hiding place. “Maybe we should just keep this car instead and leave the Beetle here.”

  “We can’t do that, Ben.” Julianna opened her door and the dome light flickered back on again. She stifled a yawn as a bone-deep fatigue suddenly hit her; she couldn’t wait to get back to Pawnee and put this long day behind them. “That would be stealing.”

  “Yeah, Elijah,” Jon mumbled. “God forbid we do anything illegal.” He dropped his hands again to answer Elijah’s question. “I still say we need to ditch this car. The cops are looking for it right now, and I think we’re safer in the Bug.”

  The dead sheriff’s squad car was far too conspicuous of a getaway vehicle, but the Volkswagen was much slower, and nearly as conspicuous. Jon’s only hope was that the police might assume he and the others wouldn’t return to the Beetle tonight, and hence wouldn’t bother checking on it for a while. He supposed stealing yet another vehicle was an option, but at this point such a venture seemed worse than pointless. He didn’t know how to hotwire a car any more than Elijah or Julianna did, and finding one with its keys already in the ignition—as they’d found the Volkswagen at the dairy farm—would take a lot of luck, even in a town like Mullwein, where people probably left their cars unlocked all the time.

  Elijah had turned around and was studying him. In the muted glow of the dome light, the bruises and cuts on the younger boy’s face looked worse than ever, but he was no longer the terrified little kid he had been a mere six hours before. The confrontation with Bonnor Tucker had clearly changed him, somehow, and Jon wasn’t sure at all that this was a good thing.

  “Okay,” Elijah said, nodding reluctantly. “Let’s make the switch, then. But I’m taking the radio with us. We need to keep track of what’s going on.”

  The police radio in Buckley’s squad car was on, but so far they’d heard nothing on it that had anything to do with them.

  Jon shook his head. “It’s bolted to the dash.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, you two,” Julianna scolded, unsettled by all this talk of thievery. “You’re acting like a pair of gangsters. Can we just go home, please?”

  She lifted Ronnie Buckley’s Colt .45 from the seat beside her and got out of the car. She’d found the holstered weapon hanging on a coat rack at the bottom of the stairs of the Buckleys’ residence, right above the body of Ronnie Buckley. She had no faith in her ability to shoot the thing, of course, but she was glad to have it anyway; the way their night had gone so far made her wonder what else might happen to them before they made it back home.

  Half an hour earlier, Ronnie Buckley’s head had struck the steel door at the base of the steps less than five seconds after Bonnor Tucker’s skull first collided with the bars of Elijah’s jail cell. In the hallway of the jailhouse, the effect was like two bells being rung at a monastery, summoning the monks to matins. A percussive thud followed immediately as Elijah brained Bonnor with the deputy’s own nightstick, and then the steel door at the end of the hall swung open, revealing Julianna Dapper with a gun in her hand, standing over an ominously motionless Ronnie Buckley. Julianna’s face was wild at first, but the instant she saw Elijah gawking back at her, her expression had changed to joy.

  “Oh, thank God!” she cried. “You’re alive!”

  Elijah would wonder at himself later when it occurred to him that seeing the sheriff’s body at Julianna’s feet hadn’t made much of an impression. His relief at Julianna’s return and his fear for Jon had taken precedence over everything else; all that mattered to him at that moment was that Julianna was back with them, and Jon was in urgent need of her help.

  “Julianna!” Elijah pressed against the bars of his cell, temporarily forgetting that Bonnor had left the keys in the cell door during their confrontation and he could now let himself out. He was still in a crouch after wrestling Bonnor’s nightstick away from the man. “Jon’s been shot!”

  “No, I haven’t,” Jon said in an odd, detached voice. He was on his feet, but he was staring down in shock at the hole in the far left side of his chest. There was a line of blood running from the bullet wound all the way to the waistband of his shorts, and he suddenly seemed to become aware of what this actually meant.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, raising his head to gape across the hall at Elijah. His eyes were the size of quarters. “I’ve been shot!”

  He fell to his knees as the room spun around him.

  Julianna was at his side in an instant, followed a few seconds later by Elijah, with Bonnor’s revolver and nightstick securely in his possession. Julianna set the sheriff’s gun down on the floor and examined Jon’s injuries, then placed her hands directly on the bullet holes, ignoring Jon’s moan of protest as she pressed hard to slow the bleeding. Elijah knelt on Jon’s other side and looked on anxiously.

  “How bad is it?” Jon asked, clenching his teeth. “It hurts like hell.”

  “You were very, very lucky,” Julianna murmured, adopting her mother’s reassuring manner with people who were sick. “I don’t think the bullet hit anything too important. We’ll get you fixed up in a jiffy.” She looked at Elijah to tell him to find some clean cloth or bandages, but the moment she saw all his bruises and lacerations close up she recoiled.

  “Dear God in heaven!” she gasped. “What on earth happened to you?”

  Elijah tried to smile through swollen lips. “Things got a little rough down here.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the unconscious Bonnor with a sense of unreality bordering on stupefaction. Everything had been so chaotic in the past few minutes that he had only begun to process exactly what it was that he’d done.

  I’ll be goddamned, he marveled. His chest felt as if it were going to burst with pride; it was the first time in his life he’d ever experienced such a glorious sense of self-satisfaction. I actually KO’d that dumb son of a bitch!

  Julianna followed his gaze and her eyes narrowed as she studied Bonnor Tucker’s prostrate form. Bonnor was breathing normally and his color was good, and Julianna froze as her highly developed instinct for survival stirred in her breast.

  “There’s not much time,” she whispered. “We have to go home right now.”

  She glanced down the hall at Sheriff Buckley’s body at the base of the staircase and knew without checking that the man who had been her host that night was now dead; his neck was at an awkward angle, and one of his beefy arms was twisted under his back in what looked like a contortionist’s trick. Julianna couldn’t recall exactly what had transpired upstairs—she had only a vague memory of two people in a laundry room pleading with her to calm down—but she somehow knew she was to blame for the sheriff’s death, and likely more than this, as well. She closed her eyes in grief, but quickly opened them again, forcing herself to concentrate.

  “Ben, we have to move fast.” Her voice was calm, and both Elijah and Jon began to breathe a little easier as she spoke, responding unconsciously to the steadiness of her tone. “Help me drag the deputy into one of the cells before he wakes up.”

  Elijah stared down at her, then hopped to obey, surrendering the revolver and the nightstick to Jon. Julianna released Jon’s shoulder and stepped into the hallway, stooping to wipe the blood from her hands on Bonnor’s uniform before seizing one of the deputy’s booted feet and ordering Elijah to grab the other one. Puffing and straining together, they heaved Bonnor into the cell Elijah had recently vacated, then they returned to the hall and locked the cell door be
hind them.

  “Good,” Julianna said with a dismissive sniff. She removed Elijah’s handcuffs with Bonnor’s keys and stepped back into Jon’s cell to do the same for him. “Now stay here with Jon while I find something to bind his wounds. Put your hands on him like this, right on the bullet holes,” she demonstrated on Elijah’s chest and back. “Push hard, even if he complains. Understand?”

  She waited for his nod, then nudged him toward Jon as he hesitated. “There’s no need to be squeamish, Benjamin. It’s just blood.”

  The top part of her dress was unzipped in back and she reached back to correct this oversight before trotting down the hall to the office, leaving the two boys by themselves. Jon was now seated on the cot in his cell, feeling lightheaded, and Elijah joined him, sitting down on the cot beside him. The younger boy swallowed hard, fighting a wave of nausea as he looked at the bean-sized hole on Jon’s chest, about an inch away from his armpit. The exit wound on Jon’s back was messier and larger than the one on his front, but both were oozing blood at the same slow, steady rate, like sap trickling down the bark of a maple tree.

  “Pretty gross, huh?” Jon grimaced, cupping the hole on his chest with his right hand in an attempt to staunch the flow.

  Elijah shoved Jon’s hand out of the way and covered the wounds with his own palms, pressing on each side of Jon’s body just as Julianna had instructed.

  “Shit!” Jon gasped. He looked away as blood ran between Elijah’s fingers. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

  Elijah’s throat burned with bile and he had to look away, too. “I think Julianna must be some kind of nurse or something,” he mumbled, trying to distract both of them. “She seems to know a lot about this kind of stuff.”

  “Maybe,” Jon grunted, not paying attention. He nodded his head toward Buckley’s body at the base of the stairwell. “The sheriff’s dead.”