by Ninie Hammon
When he enters the group of people surrounding the boat on the dock, it parts before him like the Red Sea and he passes through amid muttering he ignores. He is floating now, cannot feel his legs move or his feet touch the planking. Word of him flows ahead through the crowd like wind through wheat. People turn to stare, men suck in their breath; women utter stifled cries. When the shock wave finally reaches the people on the deck of the boat, his father looks up over their heads. He is confused, looks around, wonders what—
Then he sees Daniel. There is no look on his face of any kind. It goes utterly blank. His arms go limp and he lets go of the Bible in his hands. It falls to the deck, the sound strangely noisy in the sudden hush. There is a beat or two before Daniel hears a scream, an agonized wail that he recognizes is his mother, though he cannot locate her. Then he spots her, knocking people out of her way, her face so distorted by emotion she is hardly recognizable.
She rushes toward him, limping and he sees that she has lost one of her high heels.
“Marianne,” she wails and snatches the lifeless child out of his arms. “Annie, baby, talk to Mommy. What’s wrong, honey? Talk to Mommy. Marianne!”
A man appears out of the crowd who is clearly a doctor and tells Margaret to put the child on the boards of the dock under one of the bright lights where he can examine her. Daniel stands watching, momentarily forgotten. His father appears beside his mother, who is babbling hysterically to the doctor, her voice rising in volume and pitch with every word.
“Wake her up, she’s fine, she just needs to wake up, open your eyes, Sweetheart and give the doctor a big smile, Marianne, talk to Mommy now. You’re scaring me—Marianne! Marianne!”
The doctor kneeling beside Marianne, rocks back on his heels, turns and scans the crowd until his eyes fall on Daniel. His look is compassionate, his voice kind.
“Snake or spider, son?”
“Black widow.” Though the words come out in a harsh rasp, Daniel is surprised he is able to speak at all. “Huge.” He makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger to indicate a shape three inches across. “In the cuff of my pants, she found—”
Daniel’s mother lifts her head slowly to look at him, then. Her face twists in horror and rage. “You brought a spider into the house! You brought a poisonous spider…you let it bite your little sister!”
“I didn’t…I—”
“I trusted you. She’s only a little girl, a baby. Why didn’t you protect her?”
His mother is screeching in a voice Daniel has never heard, her face a mask of undiluted hatred.
“I couldn’t…it—”
“You brought a spider…? My precious little…you killed—” She stops as abruptly as if she has run into a steel beam. Her face is totally expressionless for an instant, then her features rearrange themselves into a pleasant concerned expression. “You’re in big trouble, young man. You know that, don’t you? It’ll be a long time before I let you babysit again.” She turns back to the dead child lying on the dock. “Marianne’s little hand is going to be sore for days. I bet I have to sit up with her all night with an ice pack on it, poor little thing.” She reaches over and pushes the child’s curls behind her ear. “You sleep now, Sweetheart.” She glances up at the stunned crowd of onlookers. “Shhh, don’t wake her. That bug bite is going to sting when she wakes up.”
Daniel glances at his father, realizing with surprising maturity that the man has lost his wife as well as his daughter. And that Daniel has lost all three of them.
Hot tears leaked out of the corners of Daniel’s eyes. He thought about Marianne every day, every day of his life, but he hadn’t cried for her in a long time. Or for his mother, who had remained in denial until the funeral, then had to be sedated. Within a week, his devastated father had packed up his shattered family and moved back to Margaret’s hometown in Tennessee so her mother and sisters could help care for her, see her through her grief. Daniel’s mother never spoke to him again, refused to look at him. On Christmas morning, Daniel found her hanging from a rafter in the garage.
Maybe Daniel was crying for her. Or maybe for Andi, who almost died but didn’t, who came back from—somewhere!—profoundly changed.
Maybe he was crying for the wife who had betrayed him.
Or for Theresa, who had lost her beloved Bishop.
Or for Jack, who had a haunted look in his eyes, the pale shadow of some unspeakable tragedy.
Or maybe he was crying for himself.
He watched the fan shadows, sentries marching around and around the room, and felt his tears slide down his temples and soak into the pillow.
CHAPTER 20
The sky was robin’s-egg blue without a cloud in sight when Jack and Daniel drove out of Cincinnati on Interstate 71, crossed the bridge over the Ohio River, and headed south toward the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Danforth. Jack was in something approaching a good mood. The sunshine had dispelled some of the gloom he’d been feeling. He was wearing an open-neck shirt and jeans, not a uniform, though as of nine o’clock this morning, his uniform was no longer “naked”—with no badge or gun. When he’d stopped in at the station to tell Crock where he was going, Crock had plopped both on his desk and given him the good news: the Board of Inquiry had ruled that the bullet Jack had put in Miranda Burke’s chest was a “righteous shoot.”
“Helps that you only winged the little girl,” Crock had said, “that she wasn’t hurt as bad as everybody thought at first.”
Just winged her. Right. She died!
Jack faced resolutely forward, didn’t look at Daniel when he spoke. “You haven’t said anything—publicly, I mean—about Andi and…how she came back—or whatever it was. Why not?”
“I can’t talk about what happened because I don’t know what happened,” Daniel said. “Do you?”
“No, but I’m not supposed to. You are.”
“You want to know if what happened to Andi was a miracle? And if it was, what that means? Sorry, Charlie, but my answers are I don’t know, and I don’t know.”
“You think God saved her…right?” Jack said.
“I didn’t say that. But you don’t think so, or you wouldn’t have asked. Don’t you believe in God?”
Jack snorted. “Of course, I believe in God. You’d have to be an idiot to believe all this”—he gestured at the beautiful summer day outside the car windows—“just happened. But did God save Andi?” He paused, then pressed resolutely forward. “See, I’ve got a history-of-the-world full of evidence that God’s way more into letting horrible things happen to people than he is into ‘saving’ people from them.”
Daniel said nothing and Jack continued. “But you can’t say God’s not ‘good’ because he gets to define what good is. So he always wins.”
“And that’s cheating.”
“Which is one of the reasons I don’t trust him. I don’t like stacked decks.”
Still Daniel said nothing. Maybe Jack had been expecting an argument, but he didn’t get one. Instead, Daniel said, “You think we can trust Billy Ray, believe what he says?”
“Of course not. But he might give something away—if we’re lucky.”
“And you think that’d be lucky—to find Becca?”
“You don’t?”
“I know we have to find her, but am I looking forward to it? No.”
“Why not?”
“Theresa said she had…the knowing, or whatever it is, like Andi. I don’t want to know what an adult Andi is like, what all this is doing to her.” He paused for a beat. “And now Andi’s having…visions.” Jack glanced over at Daniel, whose face looked positively gray.
“Visions?”
“Vision. Singular, one.” He described in detail what Andi had told him and Emily. Jack asked questions, but nothing about it seemed to make rational sense. Big surprise there.
“She saw it, the same thing, three times,” Daniel said.
“Paint splatters, then shapes. A double-T, like the Texas Tech logo beside a square?”
Daniel nodded.
“A red triangle, two silver circles, a straight brown line, a bell and a pointed cross—that all?”
“That’s enough. It’s senseless.”
“That’s why I do want to talk to Becca. To her, or anybody else who can make some sense of all this.” Jack suddenly pounded his fist on the steering wheel, surprised by the intensity of his own emotions. “I want to know what’s going on! How, maybe even why, it involves me.”
“And you think Becca knows.”
“Maybe not all of it, but I think she knows more than I do.”
They didn’t talk after that. Jack thought about what he would say to Billy Ray Hawkins, who likely would have refused to see them—Theresa didn’t seem to think he was a particularly sociable kind of guy—but he was due to be released on parole soon and likely wanted to at least appear cooperative.
The Kentucky State Penitentiary in Danforth was about twenty miles east of Lexington, Kentucky in a surprisingly scenic location, a collection of ugly gray buildings in a shallow valley, fenced only by forests and fields. The visitation room was as bare as an empty footlocker and smelled vaguely like one. A wooden table, straight-back wooden chairs, a bare light bulb—but the window offered a view of a meadow filled with wildflowers.
Jack and Daniel had only been seated at the table a couple of minutes when a guard brought Billy Ray to the room. No handcuffs, no leg irons. This was, after all, a minimum security facility.
He wasn’t a big man, maybe five feet eight, had likely been called “small, but scrappy” as a child and “tough and sinewy” as a young man. Older now, he looked less tough than merely skinny, with boney elbows protruding from the sleeves of his orange jumpsuit, clavicles as sharp as axe blades and a face of craggy angles—high cheek bones, a prominent nose and a jutting chin that looked like the knob of a femur.
There was a tear-drop tattoo inked in blue below Billy Ray Hawkins’s left eye, but Jack suspected the unmarked skin on the rest of his face was the only space left on his entire body that was. Full sleeves of tattoos—dragons, skulls, fanged-creatures—extended down both arms and crawling vines inched up the sides of his neck out of his collar. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing tattoos down his chest into the mat of hair that had once been black, but now was the color of ashes.
The hair on his head was thin and limp, his eyes a muddy, unreadable brown.
“We appreciate you agreeing to talk to us,” Jack said and rose from where he’d been sitting at the table, “and we won’t take up much of your time.”
Billy Ray barked a laugh at that. “Like you think maybe I got plans? Social obligations? You’re in luck ’cause my dance card happens to be bone empty at the moment.”
Jack wasn’t expecting the sound of Billy Ray’s voice. It was startling, a deep raspy base, ragged, hoarse and gravelly—like you’d sound if you’d cheered too loud and long at a football game. The man had severely damaged his vocal chords somehow.
“I’m Jack Carpenter,” Jack said, didn’t bother to offer a perfunctory handshake. “This is Daniel Burke.”
Daniel nodded. Billy Ray pulled out a chair, but didn’t push it back up to the table when he sat in it. Jack returned to where he’d been sitting.
“Billy Ray Hawkins here. Ain’t William Raymond, or nothing like that. Plain old Billy Ray. Friends call me Hawk.” He paused for a beat, glaring at them, though his face remained impassive. “You boys can call me Mr. Hawkins.” He leaned back in his chair and extended his long thin legs out in front of him. “And I don’t need no introductions. I know who are.”
“That so,” Jack said.
“You’re the cop, right?” He turned to Daniel. “And you’re a preacher. Yore little girl got shot up Cincinnati, I hear. She doin’ all right, now? Hate to think of a little one getting hurt like that.”
He said it all with a crocodile smile and Jack knew then Billy Ray wasn’t going to tell them anything. He was only playing with them, amusing himself because—well, like he said, it wasn’t like he had anything else to do.
“How do you know about my daughter?”
Billy Ray barked out another laugh. “Ain’t you never heard that ‘Google is your friend?’”
“I didn’t know you had—”
“Internet? You see any bars on these windows, any locks on the doors, or razor wire fences? This here’s a minimum security prison for those of us who ain’t no threat to society no more.” Billy Ray paused, then spoke with a look on his face Jack could not read. “I hear ole Bishop Washington bought the farm that day, too. I hated to hear that.”
“You’re scheduled for parole soon is what I hear,” Jack said. “All rehabilitated and ready to go home. Looking forward to that, are you?”
Billy Ray caught Jack’s meaning.
“I am for a fact. That’s why I looked you fine gentlemen up before you got here, so I’d be prepared to help you out any way I can.” He paused for a beat. “I didn’t have to look you up, though. Took me a little while, but I finally recognized those names. You’s friends with Becca when you’s kids, wasn’t you.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Jack seized the opportunity. “We’re trying to locate her and we are hoping you can tell us where she is.”
“Lost touch, didja, and now you want to catch up on old times. That how it is?”
“Something like that,” Daniel said.
He turned to Jack. “Don’t surprise me none, you looking for her.” He looked full into Jack’s face, then slathered his next words in loathing “I seen the way you used to look at her. Her all blonde and fair and you black as the ace of spades.”
Daniel tensed, but Jack showed no reaction whatsoever.
“Tell us where she is and you’ll be assisting in a police investigation,” Jack said evenly. “I’ll see the powers that be hear how you cooperated.”
Though the look of hatred never left Billy Ray’s eyes, he’d made his point, and now he slithered back behind his facade of conviviality. “I’m always glad to help out the po-lice any way I can,” he said, spreading out his hands in a gesture of compliance. “But I’m sorry to say I can’t accommodate you boys in locating my daughter.”
“Why not,” Daniel demanded.
“’Cause I ain’t got no idea where that kid is, that’s why not. I ain’t seen her since…she was in the courtroom the day I got sentenced. Didn’t say nothing, but I seen her sitting in the back.” He let out a long sigh. “And I ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since. That was goin’ on eighteen years ago. Not so much as a letter, a post card, a Christmas card—nothin.’ You know what I think?” he leaned toward Jack and grinned. “I think she up and jumped off a bridge somewhere and ain’t nobody ever found her body. She was like that—pouty and moody, depressed like. You ask me, I say she’s dead.”
Jack and Daniel walked out to the car together in silence. They got in and Daniel asked, “You believe him?”
“I wouldn’t believe Billy Ray Hawkins if he told me pigeons crapped on statues,” Jack said. “That is one seriously bad human being.” He sighed. “But I don’t think he knows where Becca is. Would you keep in touch with that Neanderthal? I’m sure she saw his imprisonment as her reprieve. She may have spent the past eighteen years becoming invisible so he’d never find her.”
* * * * * * *
Whenever he could snare some weed, Hawk smoked it in the shed behind the storage buildings that held supplies for the kitchen. As one of the kitchen “trusties,” Hawk had a key to the building, which would likely be bulldozed if the state come in next spring to do the renovation they’d been promising for the past seven years. Wasn’t fit for much of anything now the way the roof leaked, and nothing was stored here except the riding lawnmower that hadn’t worked for the past two summers, various broken garden tools, and in-need-of-repair lawn equipment.
’Course, Hawk didn’t care one way or the other what the state might do next spring. He wouldn’t be here then. He’d be free!
>
He took a deep drag on the joint, pulled the smoke as deep as he could into his lungs and let it out slowly, sighing the word out with it, “Freeee…”
Yep, ole Hawk’d be sleepin’ in his own bed real soon, getting up in the morning to the smell of honeysuckle on the trellis by the back door and going to bed at night with the warmth of a woman by his side, maybe more’n one woman. He planned to have lots of them in the months to come, as many as he could stand up to—he burped out a bleat of laughter at the unintended pun and almost choked on the marijuana smoke.
He’d been dreaming of women every night for months, had allowed himself to think on ’em soon’s he found out about his parole. Couldn’t do that in the years before, or he’d have gone bug-crap crazy with wanting ’em. He’d seen men get like that—what they done because of it. But soon as he was free he was gonna spend a whole month in bed, doin’ one after another. He could afford it. Could afford to pay for the services of a whole herd of women—and for them little pills that’d make it possible for him to pleasure ever one of ’em, too. Keeping his mouth shut about his dope money had cost him an extra ten years on his sentence, but it was worth it now. Now, he was set for life.
He took another long drag on the joint, leaned back against the wall to get comfortable, and thought about the nigger cop who’d sashayed in here high and mighty as you please, wanting to know where his Becca was. Like he’d a’told that black ape even if he’d known.
It’d been all he could do to sit there and make nice with that buck when what he wanted to do was jump up and plunge the shiv he carried in his sock into the man’s chest, feel his blood run out over his hands. He smiled, remembering the first time he’d killed a nigger, how he’d actually been surprised their blood looked like a white man’s blood. That’s why he’d kept some of it, scooped it up off the boxcar floor and put it in that little vial with a stopper inside the amulet he wore round his neck—the one he’d stole out of the back of one of the campers where them carneys lived who come to town every summer with their rigged games and rickety old carnival rides.